Deserted Islands and Overwhelmed Readers

Alas! the days of desolate islands are no more!—

Edgar Allan Poe, rev. of Robinson Crusoe

Here’s something supposedly fun: if you were stranded on a deserted island and could have only one book, which would you choose? The appeal of this question for literary scholars seems obvious enough, as most of us like to talk about books and express our aesthetic sensibilities. Less obviously fun is the deserted island gambit, which is actually quite grim. Do we need a shipwreck or plane crash and all our fellow travelers killed just to enjoy some close reading? It might feel that way sometimes, and not simply because formal explication has come to share interpretive power with historical context and theoretical mindfulness. Negotiations of this sort have been going on for half a century without leading to imagined extremes (the disintegration of texts, the end of the canon, the death of aesthetics, and so on). More threatening today to the practice of close reading is the unprecedented, inconceivable quantity of texts so easily retrieved from electronic databases, a superabundance that when managed with computational tools makes our capacities for close reading seem measly by comparison. Every unread text on Project Gutenberg, every unclicked link on HathiTrust, every unheeded recommendation from Amazon can feel like an admonishment to those whose profession is textual mastery. Careful reading may be a fading fetish, and nonreading has a rich literary history, but most scholars of literature still find themselves drawn to the scrutiny of individual works.¹ When wonder at our information revolution wanes, we might well dream of a deserted island with just one book to command our attention.

If fantasies of close reading and anxieties of textual excess are, as I’m suggesting, mutually constituted, then literary scholars who value explication should not offhandedly reject methods of criticism that take up large numbers of texts. This is especially true for some digital humanities approaches that offer the starkest alternatives to close reading. N. Katherine Hayles identifies “hyper reading” as a hermeneutic that jumps Parkour-like between multiple sources of information (61). The “distant reading” made prominent by Franco Moretti and practiced by an increasing number of scholars subjects thousands of texts to statistical analysis (54).² Data-mining projects algorithmically read for collocations, allusions, and other linguistic patterns, while quantitative book histories and some aspects of “surface reading” have affinities with the digital humanities (Best and Marcus 1). Computer-assisted literary study was largely regarded as a curiosity from the mid to late twentieth century, but now it engenders more serious suspicion, particularly as the Internet stirs cultural concerns over shallow knowledge and information overload.

Textual excess can seem like a challenge specific to the Internet age, though intellectual and book historians, information and media scholars, as well as cultural and literary critics are tracing deeper chronologies in which advances in printing, distribution, and collection make for joyously and anxiously overwhelmed readers well before the advent of electronic texts. As radical as its potential may be, the digital humanities can be set within a surprisingly continuous narrative of mediacy, and the ways in which our current information revolution influences literary studies will continue to be conditioned by the historical relationship between close reading and textual excess. This relationship seems to me especially dynamic in the nineteenth century as readers and writers encountered the explosion of mass print, the spread of libraries and education, the rise of bureaucracy and standardized knowledge, and the increasing speed and range of communications technologies. Also of importance, but seldom factored by literary critics of print culture, is the growing power of mathematics, statistics, empiricism, probabilism, data-based empirical science, and other modes of quantitative thinking that simultaneously threatened the authority of literary knowledge and offered potential methods for managing the accelerating proliferation of texts.

How close reading fared under such circumstances is an immensely complicated question addressed here through a combination of close reading and attention to the pressures of quantification and mass print. Three case studies—the afterlife of Robinson Crusoe (1719), Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s organicism, and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s...