The Dish aired arguments about the question here and here. Chad Wellmon deepens the debate, arguing that our discomfort with the digital humanities stems from literature having taken on an almost religious quality: “After the death of God, literature is a resource for self-transformation, and reading–closely, caringly, silently–is one of our modern liturgies.” But it wasn’t always this way:
Until the end of the eighteenth century, literature referred to everything that had been printed. It wasn’t until around 1800 that it was used to refer to a particular kind of writing. Only when there was too much literature did Literature become a distinct category. In 1803 Wilhelm Schlegel, a German Romantic and one of the first scholars of Literature, lamented the pitiful state of German reading and writing. Given the ready availability of printed texts, German readers no longer read with “devotion but rather with a thoughtless distraction.” To remedy this situation he invoked Literature as a particular kind of writing that had been filtered and sorted from among the surfeit of all that had been printed. What was needed to remedy the sorry condition of German literature and thought more generally, claimed Schlegel, was a normative, critical category that would separate the good books from the bad ones and help readers make their way through the proliferation of print. Literature was not simply a “raw aggregate of books”; it was a source of spiritual relief and discovery.
For some, the digital humanities threatens to interrupt this experience of Literature by reducing texts to an aggregation of data points.
These contemporary cultural anxieties echo similar anxieties that accompanied the desacralizaiton of other kinds of texts. Consider the double bind of seventeenth and early eighteenth-century British scholars of the Bible. With the profusion of apocryphal material and new scholarly methods, they pioneered forms of inquiry that many worried would undermine the divine authority of the Bible. The enumeration of 30,000 variants among various Biblical manuscripts by the Oxford scholar John Mill, claimed some, made the Bible seem all too human. Something similar happened when eighteen-century German philologists like Friedrich A. Wolf, flush with newly discovered information and refined techniques of philological criticism, suggested that the Odyssey was not the result of one author, Homer, but the product of textual accretion over time—just as biblical scholars had eventually concluded about the Old Testament. Similar to biblical scholars, Wolf thought that he faced a choice: he could either save Homer as creator and obliterate the text or save the text and destroy the author—a figure who had become a model for humanist education.
The Dish 