Here's what this week's packet has got me thinking about:
1. When we talk about digitization, we tend to celebrate the internet as an infinitely accessible space. Folsom glorifies the volume of usership and diversity of users that access the Whitman archive, and his enthusiasm is understandable; but just how accessible is this online database and other digital media? Are all modes of access the same? Does digitization always expand accessibility? This is more than just a question of who can afford a computer or find some means to get on the internet. Digital media have multiple locations--in cyberspace, in the world, in institutional structures. And the locations of digital media determine who can access them and how they may accessed. Think about this the next time you toggle between a proxy server and a direct connection.
2. McGill is right to point out the way the Whitman Archive replicates "normative ideas of the author and the work" and that this replication acts as a "conceptual and structural horizon that keeps such projects from functioning in the radical ways that Folsom describes [i.e., complete access to Whitman's rhizomorphous work]." This leads me to wonder: Are those normative ideas of the author and the work so thoroughly embedded in the archive that no amount of digitization can move us beyond them? What would the database look like without those normative ideas?
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Feb. 6, 2008: Digital Media Discussion Questions II
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2 comments:
I'm afraid I'm not going to answer your questions Colin, only add another problem to the stew.
My question is: When we speak of the database as a genre, aren't we making a category mistake (between reference materials and literature)?
This is what strikes me as the major difference between Dimock's idea of "kinship" between literary genres and speaking about the "genre" of the database. Dimock wants to explore the unstable generic borders between traditional literary kinds (epic, lyric, novel). Folsom, McGann, et. al are concerned with the implications of the database as a _scholarly_ genre, not a literary one. Ed Folsom uses the word "epic" in his title as an adjective, not a noun; he's not actually proposing a connection between the epic genre of Homer or Milton and the genre of the Walt Whitman archive, though he seems to be excited about the "epic" nature of digital possibilities for research. By contrast, in her PMLA article, Dimock _is_ proposing a relationship between Gilgamesh and Henry James. She speaks of genres of literature, not genres of modes of research.
This makes a difference for how we conceive of the "genre" of the database. What it might mean to speak of writing a "database" in a literary sense seems to me still quite undefined (though I can offer one example where a novelist has successfully worked in this new genre: Milorad Pavic's _Dictionary of the Khazars_). The true "genre" of The Walt Whitman Archive is that of reference or resource materials. Note, for instance, that McGann compares the WWA database to card catalogs; Freedman speaks of how it replaces the need for a concordance; and we spoke ourselves about its relation to dictionaries, Google, and MLA searches.
To put this point differently, I think we should distinguish between the genres of Walt Whitman (poems, novel, journalism, songs, etc.) and the genre of the Walt Whitman archive. These different "projects" make entirely different cognitive and linguistic claims on us (surely Whitman is most interested in provoking pleasure, whereas Folsom wants to provoke new ways of knowing). It might be accurate (though boring) to speak of the "genres" of scholarly research (monograph, article, review, etc.), but I doubt our critical practices are usefully compared with more conventional literary kinds. The few scholarly works I can think of that do break with critical conventions -- Kenner's _Pound Era_, Walter Benn Michael's _Our America_, and Jed Rasula's _This Compost_ come to mind -- do not seem to have spawned many imitators so far. Maybe our dependency on the database will make it necessary to adjust the conventions of what we produce as literary critics. It's odd, though, how uniform our practices have been for over 80+ years, even as the literature of this same historical period has undergone profound aesthetic changes. It seems that academics take their cues about writing critical prose more from generic changes within the profession than from our ostensible object of study (literature).
Thanks for commenting Patrick! Your point about genre is well taken. I can think of a number of reasons to make a clear distinction between literary genres and the Whitman Archive. But then again what makes me really excited about projects like the Whitman Archive is the possibility of breaking down that boundary between primary and secondary sources. You say that Whitman wrote to produce pleasure while the Whitman Archive is designed to produce knowledge. Surely some pleasure can be gained, is supposed to be gained, from the Whitman Archive. And if this is a generic boundary that we have some control over--what's to be gained in enforcing it?
As for criticism staying the same as literature undergoes drastic changes, do you really think that's the case? Don't you think the most common style in literature right now is a pretty familiar form of realism? I'm not praising literary criticism for not changing (though I think if we were at some universities we might not be so ready to agree that it hasn't) but I'd say that a methodological conservatism in ivy league english departments has actually fostered this conservatism in American literature.
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