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OK, so SSHRC Question #1 was defined negatively through what has gone wrong in terms of language theory and digital humanities, and seeks to find out what aspects are missing from the information-theory and linguistics approaches to the literary.
SSHRC Question #2 seeks the possibilities for accounting for the otherness in language, and this entails not only the purely linguistic (language as information = the common-sense notion of communication), but the visual, the sonorous, the body, and perhaps other aspects such as free association and an embrace of the arbitrary. I do not mean the arbitrary in the structuralist sense, because that definition, even though it undermines the stability of the signifier, still upholds the signifier as signifier. One would seek the way a word, a string of words or a lose patch or any sort of combination of words might get away from the notion of “signification,” and explore the ways in which words exceed themselves.
This is where the relationship between the inter-artial and the inter-medial (the distinction is important) gets mixed with the hypermedial: a vowel can be associated with a colour or a musical note, a word with a sense, a phrase with a memory or a desire, a rhythm with a beat and a physical action (or lack thereof), a textual configuration with a painting or a piece of music, a long poem with a wide hall or a vast wasteland etc. Typically, these associations might be done in an “encyclopedic” way. If a mention is made of a skylark in a poem, then, just as with footnotes in annotated editions of a poem, the literary allusions and references are made. In this sense, the digital humanities would simply be an improvement on the printed annotated editions, in that more annotations, intertextual cross-references, pictures, music or the sounds of the skylark, interpretations and commentary and so on could be added, which is wonderful and all. Yet this would fundamentally alter the reading experience, and it presupposes that the reading experience is an encyclopedic or informed experience, and that an “uninformed” reader or reading is inferior.
Jacques Derrida already warned about this type of annotation, and what I am calling the implied “encyclopedic” reader, when talking about Joyce’s Ulysses, in Ulysse gramophone (1987). There, Derrida argues that we have to hear Joyce’s text, and warns about an impending literary archive such as I’ve described, one that will overdetermine the literary experience. Another similar warning is made by J. Hillis Miller in Illustration (1992) when he discusses the then new Thoreau Project. He says that, despite the democratic potential of such a project,the database
will presuppose, for example, that it is helpful in understanding Walden or A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers to hear the songs and see annotated pictures of the birds Thoreau mentions there. That would depend of course, on the critic’s interpretive goals.
And this project “embodies a set of assumptions about the way scholars do work and ought to work” (40).
Yet a look at some of the readings of difficult poets from the past that did not benefit from the help of scholarship is proof enough that critical apparatus does not a good reader make. Mallarmé and Joyce are cases in point: sure, early readers of these texts didn’t need the critical help because they had the cultural baggage to help them through the texts, but I think this is where the literary institution has failed. It has placed a great deal of emphasis on the literary as “content” (as either saying something: a moral, a lesson etc. = i.e. the allegorical definition of literature) and lost sight of the singularity of the literary experience. Inversely, Dante knew that it was better to “sweeten” the moral lesson with allegory. Granted that my definition of the literary is principally a formal one. Nevertheless, we can say, with some exceptions, that most literary texts cannot be translated into regular, constative prose. Besides, most so-called “constative” writing has been deconstructed and shown to be quite performative in that it plays with rhetoric. Even the scientific text plays the neutral game.
So the computer needs to be used differently. We are not afraid of, just as we aren’t afraid of the printed text. These can all open up not only the literary experience, but, as I’ve said in the previous post, our relationship with the tools we use, in this case the computer.
What I am then asking is, how can we do scholarship differently? What forms other than traditional literary scholarship are made possible by the computer, and that don’t presuppose a particular view of the text or overdetermine reading? Obviously, there is no such experience, but there is surely a way to self-reflexively encounter the text.
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