Debates in the Digital Humanities

14 Canons, Close Reading, and the Evolution of Method

[ 249 Canons, Close Reading, and the Evolution of Method matthew wilkens I have a point from which to start: canons exist, and we should do something about them. The digital humanities offer a potential solution to this problem, but only if we are willing to reconsider our priorities for digital work in ways that emphasize quantitative methods and the large corpora on which they depend. I wouldn’t have thought the first proposition, concerning canons and the need to work around them, was a dicey claim until I was scolded recently by a senior colleague who told me that I was thirty years out of date for making it. The idea being that we’d had this fight a generation ago,and the canon had lost.But I was right and he,I’m sorry to say,was wrong.Ask any grad student reading for her comps or English professor who might confess to having skipped Hamlet. As I say, canons exist. Not, perhaps, in the Arnoldian-Bloomian sense of the canon, a single list of great books, and in any case certainly not the same list of dead white male authors that once defined the field. But in the more pluralist sense of books one really needs to have read to take part in the discipline? And of books many of us teach in common to our own students? Certainly. These are canons. They exist. So why, a few decades after the question of canonicity as such was in any way current,do we still have these things? If we all agree that canons are bad,why haven’t we done away with them? Why do we merely tinker around the edges, adding a Morrison here and subtracting a Dryden there? What are we going to do about this problem? And more to the immediate point, what does any of this have to do with digital humanities and with debates internal to digital work? The Problem of Abundance The answer to the question“Why do we still have canons?”is as simple to articulate as it is apparently difficult to solve. We don’t read any faster than we ever did, even as the quantity of text produced grows larger by the year. If we need to read books in order to extract information from them and if we need to have read things in common in order to talk about them,we’re going to spend most of our time dealing part iv ][ Chapter 14 matthew wilkens 250 ] with a relatively small set of texts.The composition of that set will change over time, but it will never get any bigger. This is a canon.1 To put things in perspective, consider the scale of literary production over the last few decades as shown in Figure 14.1. Two things stand out: First, there are a lot of new books being published every year, and the number has grown rapidly over the last decade. Even excluding electronic editions and print-on-demand titles (as these figures do), we’re seeing fifty thousand or more new works of long-form fiction annually in the United States alone (and at least as many again in the rest of the worldatatimewhennationaldivisionsaregrowinglessrelevanttoculturalproduction ). The overall U.S. market for books isn’t growing beyond the larger economy (publishing revenues as a share of GDP have been constant, at about 0.2 percent, for decades [see Greco et al.]), but it’s now being split among far more titles. This is likely the result of decreasing publishing costs in everything from acquisitions to distribution and marketing.The surge in quantity of published texts is surely a good thing insofar as it represents—in raw terms, at least—greater access to the market for a wider range of authors and a more diverse choice of books for readers. But it also means that each of us reads only a truly minuscule fraction of contemporary fiction (on the order of 0.1 percent, often much less). We could call this situation the problem of abundance. It is plainly getting worse with time. Weshouldnotice,too—thisisthesecondobservationconcerningFigure14.1— thatalthoughthenumberof titlespublishedannuallywasmuchlowerpriorto2000, 0
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Figure 14.1. Number of new fiction titles published annually in the United States between 1940 and 2010. Sources: Greco et al. (1940–1991); R. R. Bowker (1993–2010). Title output for 1991 and earlier adjusted (upward...