Recovery and Obsolescence: Feminist Scholarship, Computational Criticism, and the Canon

By claiming to move beyond the few to consider the many, including authors and works previously excluded from scholarly interest, Franco Moretti's call for "distant reading" and the rise of digital humanities have proffered possible remedies for what is perceived to be ailing traditional literary studies. This challenge to rethink scale and scope in literary studies has unleashed a host of scholarship that has sought to engage critically with Moretti's ideas but in tempered, moderated forms (such as Underwood, Piper, and Bode) as well as forcefully pushed back on claims that more is better (most recently Nan Z. Da).¹ It cannot be denied that scholarship attending to the "many" or the "distant" has been productive in forcing us not only to reexamine the question of what we study but also how we study it. This self-reflection seems particularly relevant to a field such as eighteenth-century German studies, which sets as its monumental task the generation of new insights about texts that have been subjected to intense scholarly attention for more than two centuries. Indeed, Moretti's critique of the canon as only representing a small sample of what was actually written and what was actually read by contemporaries, aligns in many ways with the arguments mounted by early feminist scholars in their quest to decenter the literary canon and rethink the question of what should be read and who should be studied. This forum contribution explores the shared impulse between feminist scholarship and computational criticism to rethink the canon and reexamine what we read and study by focusing on the role of mass digitization and questions of scale for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship. It operates from a mediated position between the close-distant dichotomy that has come to inform much of the recent work by digital scholars.² Lastly, such an intervention necessarily raises questions that may not be easily answered—except by further dialogue.

Some forty years ago, feminist scholars mobilized to "recover" women's writing that had been devalued, forgotten, and/or erased from literary history in an effort to expand the canon. The 1990s and early 2000s saw the efforts of earlier scholars pay off with an increase in print collections, anthologies, and databases dedicated to the works of women writers as well as an uptake in scholarly publications drawing attention to issues of gender and sexuality.³ Taking stock in 2019, we can conclusively say that while substantive progress has been made, this recovery process is ongoing and faces new challenges. In the age of digital archives and quantitative analysis, scholars are presented not only with new tools to conduct their ongoing work but with many of the same past problems now manifested in new (digital) forms. Can current tools and methods offered by cultural analytics that consider the "many" rather than only the "few" assist scholars, specifically at the intersection of feminist inquiry and eighteenth-century German studies, not only in recovering and preserving the works of women writers—and, indeed, all authors who have been traditionally marginalized—but in increasing their presence and significance within scholarship? Can they really contribute to reading "the unread"? Might reading and thinking both "big" and "distant," as well as "deep" and "close," help us not only to redraw the boundaries of the canon, or indeed to jettison them entirely, but to also further deepen our understanding of the contributions that both central and peripheral writers have made to literary traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Or have the problems that have dogged traditional humanist scholarship merely been transported into the digital context? Does focus on large sample sizes and low margins of error place the methods of computational analysis at odds with feminist scholarship? Or can a case be made for mobilizing scale and scope to move away from traditional center-periphery dichotomies of canon formation? In sum, are we dealing with false promises or real potential, even revision?

Recent digital scholarship in the field of German studies and English offer some initial responses to these questions and provide preliminary models upon which to expand...