Forum: Canon versus "The Great Unread"

When we embarked on editing the Goethe Yearbook, we brainstormed ideas about formats for disseminating research that would usefully complement the stellar articles that appear annually. Our interest turned to the forum, a robust format that has fostered lively debate elsewhere (e.g., Eighteenth Century Theory and Interpretation) and has recently been popularized by our colleagues at the German Quarterly. Naturally, we zeroed in on a topic that is still underrepresented in the Yearbook but that has begun to alter the ways in which we approach the study of Goethe and, more broadly, the eighteenth century—within our comparatively small field in North America, as well as in Germany and in adjacent disciplines invested in the period (e.g., comparative literature and comparative cultural studies, genre studies, English, Atlantic studies, and history). We are, of course, speaking of Digital Humanities (DH). In the process of identifying experts in the field, we discovered that a few years ago graduate programs in German (at Yale, the University of Chicago, and Konstanz) had devoted a short course to the topic that inspired the title of our inaugural forum.

As we approached potential contributors, we posed a series of questions, intended to spark not direct answers, but to serve as an impulse for reflection: What is the canon? How do we define it and how has it been reenvisioned beyond DH? What is the relationship between "mining" thousands of texts through algorithms and scholarship "merely" based on the interpretation of select literary works? What are the consequences of digitizing primary materials? How do DH methodologies and analytical practices enhance and/or endanger the study of the canon? How does "close reading" versus "distant reading" affect the legacy of canonical authors and their impact on the construction of national literary historiography in the nineteenth century? What is at stake for the discipline of literary study—for the act of (close) reading—when we ask the question about the canon versus the "great unread"? Nine colleagues who are engaged in the theory and practice of DH scholarship responded to our call. The scope of their work is impressive, providing detailed yet suggestive overviews of DH methodologies, insights into the importance of DH and its ability to recuperate historically marginalized writers, case studies of temporary canonicity, and challenges to canonical approaches to the Goethezeit.

In framing the debate, we kept in mind the larger context of German studies, while assuming an uncontested relevance of literature and textual studies, certainly among the readers of the Goethe Yearbook. And while we recognized the pitfalls of posing canonical literature as "read" in opposition to a virtually boundless spectrum of texts that can be analyzed only as data, we hoped to prompt a less polarized discussion about the imagined impact of DH and "computational criticism" on our field. We wanted to create a section that allows scholars—whether they are newcomers or well-versed in DH, interested in or deeply skeptical about data—to glimpse the innovative field's rich opportunities, its first instances of obsolescence, even its evident shortfalls; our goal is to allow our readers to decide for themselves whether to read broadly, which directions to pursue further, or whether to disregard the field completely. We invite continuous engagement with the contributions, not to succumb to a trend, but to continue the dialogue.

The following essays impressively show that our aim for open discussions was spot-on. The contributors not only address ways in which DH can broaden an understanding of our field, but they also identify new challenges that arise; quite a few returned to the original meaning of "the great unread" in Margaret Cohen's formulation, namely the fact that canon formation has always implied a curtailing of tradition (as opposed to the texts produced in any given period). Each contribution reveals, in unique ways, not only that possible definitions of and approaches to DH are about as manifold as its projects and practitioners, but that the field has begun what we may call its own historicization; it now encompasses digital preservation, humanistic inquiry about digital objects (text, image, space, networks...