4th Post, Week 6

Hopefully, this is my last thought for this week’s post, so I don’t have to revisit it and modify it like I add with my post for last week.

I had to look Matthew Wilkens up, and it turned out that he is specialized in contemporary American fiction and in digital and computational literary studies, which really made a lot of sense with regard to his essay. I know for a fact that one of my old professors would totally disagree with Wilkens to the point of even rejecting the argument of his essay and perhaps the overall content, but not me. I have always viewed literary analysis and cultural analysis as inseparable type of studies and should always react with one another and answer to each other. In his essay, Wilkens touches on this issue in a very interesting way, which relates to the discourse of digital humanities and at the same time to some of our previous readings.

Wilkens starts off his essay with the everlasting problem of the canon. In my understanding, the canon has always been a problematic issue that resists solution. Wilkens admits to this problematic issue and explains that the canon, in its broadest sense, will always exist. From the canon, Wilkens descends to reading and questions the question, what do we really read and how is reading adding to our knowledge about the past and the present around us? It is obvious that we are in an age of abundance and it seems to be as such for the past decades and most likely will continue to be for the future. Wilkens believes that the problem of abundance has created a problem for us of not being able “to keep up with [the] contemporary literary production” (251). Therefore, the question changes from what to read to what “to ignore”? Wilkens argues that what we read is “nonrepresentative of the full field of literary and cultural production” (251). And so he proposes that we should reconsider our positions of the notion of close reading.

Wilkens argues that “[w]e need to do less close reading and more of anything and everything else that might help us extract information from and about texts as indicators of larger cultural issues” (251). As with everyday that goes by, I see the urge and the need to adapt to Wilkens’s view. To support his argument, Wilkens draws an example from history that is facilitated through the use of digitization. In his discussion of “Text Extraction and Mapping,” I think Wilkens is able to prove his argument of how spending less time in close reading texts and focusing more on the general context of those texts, we will be able to understand history and culture better. With the specific example he uses, I think we ought to reconsider our previous understanding of American regionalism in the 19^th century.

Wilkens’s example relates to our previous readings in a very interesting way. From two weeks ago, Mussell argued that through digitizing humanities, we will be able to understand the past better. Well, here, I think it is evident with Wilkens’s example since through digitization of the 19^th century American texts, the software is able to gather the data of places from texts published in a single year, and produces a statistic figure that has changed our views of the past in understanding American regionalism.

 (I don’t know, but I feel the further we move in our course, the better loose ends become tied up together very neatly)

Since I will be presenting on the websites part of our class tonight, I feel there is no need for me to discuss them here. But I will post the handout that I intend to give out tonight with discussion questions.