Literary Studies Needs to Stop Being a Theology

Recently, a whole slew of posts and publications caused me to return to a thread of thinking that was central to the coda of my book William Blake and the Digital Humanities. First, Ted Underwood responded to a conversation on Facebook about the difficulty of incorporating digital humanities into literary studies.

If digital methods were embodied in a critical “approach,” like psychoanalysis, they would be easy to assimilate. We could identify digital “readings” of familiar texts, add an article to every Norton edition, and be done with it. In some cases that actually works, because digital methods do after all change the way we read familiar texts. But DH also tends to raise foundational questions about the way literary scholarship is organized. Sometimes it valorizes things we once considered “mere editing” or “mere finding aids”; sometimes it shifts the scale of literary study, so that courses organized by period and author no longer make a great deal of sense.

This question of organization or periodization is foundational to Ted’s great book Why Literary Periods Mattered, I reviewed it here. But there’s another question that I asked Ted, namely - why social science methodologies are mostly rejected in literary studies. They thrive in, for example, rhetoric and composition where they live quite nicely next to more traditionally humanistic methods of study. Alex Reid’s response similarly mentioned the social science aspect, but also turned towards the need for focusing more on digital literacy than print literacy.

What they [literary studies] need to do is respond to the broader digital turn happening around them, which might mean exploring the computational/statistical methods of literary studies DH, but mostly means building a digital literacy curriculum in place of the print literacy curriculum that currently exists. What literary studies should do in this regard I have no idea, but I wouldn’t equate English departments with literary studies.

I completely agree with these sentiments, but I think the larger issue is the theological character of close reading approaches to literary study. As Franco Moretti argues in Graphs, Maps, Trees “[a]t bottom, [close reading] is a theological exercise-a very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously” (151). In fact, the view of history invoked in literary studies is closer to a form of Biblical or Hegelian ideology rather than any rigorous materialist study. There are a few exceptions to this, the work of William St. Clair being one, but largely literary studies is a theological discourse. We place a solemn reading of a single text into a “historical context,” when we relate the events occurring around the date of the text’s publication. History inevitably means the history of humans, ideas, and social institutions. Contemporary literary criticism reads like a sermon. Perhaps the sermon has some great cultural lessons for those of us stricken with particular sins (capitalism, racism, heterosexism), but it is — at bottom — a close interpretation with a lesson. When Levi Bryant argues in the introduction to his new book Onto-Cartography that materialism in critical theory has departed from really addressing matter and become about social context, discourse, and texts — I can only see Ted’s original point underlined. Literary critics are afraid of the social sciences in much the same way as creationists are afraid of evolution: we have no idea what to do with a world in which our gods don’t matter.

Literary scholarship still needs to catch up with evolution. It needs to stop asserting theology in the wake of loss. Jerome McGann’s new book, A New Republic of Letters — for all of its extremely useful discussion of digital/institutional infrastructures, archives, and sustainability — still reinforces this theological approach to history. “I want to say that human memory means pretty much exactly what it meant to Montaigne,” says McGann, “to Tolstoy, to Proust, to Sebald, […] a condition that transforms human memory, that most personal experience, into … what shall we call it? A sense of History?” Further down he elaborates. “[M]emory is how we take care of what we love and lose. […] We create machineries to help us remember-the arts, or rather the artifactures, of memory. Libraries, museums, digital environments. Families. Nations. Ceremonies. No question but these machines are unreliable and often destructive.” McGann is, no doubt, working through the various complications to a human-centered notion of history. At center, though, history is human memory found in taking care and loss.

But, of course, there is no certainty that anything we create will survive for long, quite the opposite really. Deep time shows us that human memory really doesn’t matter in a cosmic sense. For me, half of the anxiety of the digital humanities is found in the fact that the theological core of literary studies is finally, seriously, confronting methodologies that rely on data and observation. What does the literary canon mean when billions of works are suddenly available online? How can we continue to write books based upon close readings of a few selected canonical philosophers and authors, when there’s so much more evidence that’s available from everyday people? What does our discipline mean when it’s much more likely that — in a few thousand years or more — no one will have ever heard of Shakespeare? These are challenges to be sure, but they are exciting challenges. And they’re only available to us when we let go of our egotism and our mourning and embrace something different.