Literary Studies in the Digital Age

It’s fascinating to see that technology is freeing information, helps to eliminate the false conception of academic elite etc when all can engage in the discussion.

Great to note the drawbacks as well as benefits of this system.

I really like this passage and the paras before on the expanded field of enquiry- really welcoming and well-written.

Firstly thanks for this great online resource.

On this part of the paragraph, I would add that the digital allows, in some cases, not merely power steering for humanitites practices which already exist, but avenues for the construction of new KINDS of knowledge which were hitherto inexistent.

While word frequency tables such as this one generate from a computer, there are endless possibilities for humanistic study. For example, the patterns can help shed light on the emotional impact of the text throughout the writing.

I have been thinking a lot about The Third Policeman recently, and thinking that at some point the text in the text box on the left should be mostly blank space – just a few lines of text – because the footnotes get so long. It’s an interesting reversal of form where the annotations get privileged over the text, begging Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s question of whether we can see ourselves no longer as authors of a text [Planned Obsolescence 62]. Instead, we see the text, as it expands with annotations, as a text in its own right.

Glad to see this Chaucer blog example! As it happens, I have been running a similar blog since 2006 and wrote up the experience in an MLA Approaches to Teaching Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: https://www.mla.org/Publications/Bookstore/Approaches-to-Teaching-World-Literature/Approaches-to-Teaching-Chaucer-s-Canterbury-Tales-Second-Edition.

[In digital annotation, individual needs and requirements must be met.]

Must be met, or can be? The line between providing additional information likely unknown to the reader is a shifting one. In the Norton Critical edition of Melville’s short novels, some annotations are clearly informational; one is on the source material for “Benito Cereno,” for example. But others assume a low level of analytical ability. One suggests that a paragraph “can be seen as a description of a torture chamber,” when Melville, among other cues, has already written in that paragraph that one piece of furniture “seemed some grotesque engine of torment.” Hardly opaque.

In order to meet a range of needs, might we consider layered practices: tiers of annotations that can be hidden or unhidden as need requires?

[Conversely, our idea of how annotation becomes most trustworthy and authoritative will influence how we organize its practice.]

Annotated annotations might be helpful here, with notes on the annotator’s credentials, if the comment warrant such authority.

[If you think, for example, as Archibald MacLeish does, that “A poem should not mean / But be,” annotation becomes impossible. ]

Well, annotation becomes more limited in scope, at least. Inclusion of informational annotations, such as those that define Elizabethan terms in Shakespeare or locate a referenced place, in some ways help the poem “be” more than without them. Though I get MacLeish’s point.