DHPoco Summer School Forums

In some respects, distant reading is scary because it seems to stray so far from the Leavisite tradition in which so many of us were trained as literary scholars. I think there is also a fear that such an approach turns literature into data and, in doing so, strips it of what distinguishes it from, well, word soup. I'm inclined to think that close reading and distant reading together can be instrumental and instructive methods of analyzing a text. I also think it's not so bad of distant reading destabilizes the fetish of the "novel" or the "poem" a little bit - maybe we could use a little levelling at the level of "What is Literature?" Those of us working in fields beyond the canons of American or British literature in English know how definitions of "literature" have functioned as a tool of exclusion at best and a denial of humanity, citizenship, and legibility (I'm thinking the Phillis Wheatley trial here) at worst.