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The Digital Humanities, Inc.: Literary Criticism and the Fate of a Profession

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Andrew Kopec
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Abstract

The popularization of the digital humanities and the return to formalism are overdetermined by the perceived crises in the humanities. On the one hand, the new formalism harks back to a professionalizing strategy begun by the New Critics with John Crowe Ransom's “Criticism, Inc.,” drawing strength from close reading's original polemic against industrialism. On the other hand, the digital humanities reimagine professional labor in ways that seemingly approximate postindustrial norms. These contradictory but inextricably related visions of professional futures restage a conflict between literature and data, reading and making, that has been misrecognized as a conflict between literature and history. Approaching these tensions by way of historicist critique can illuminate the extent to which the debate between literature and data will define critical practice in the twenty-first century.

Type
Introduction
Information
PMLA , Volume 131 , Issue 2 , March 2016 , pp. 324 - 339
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2016

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