Data, Maps, Networks – Digital Approaches to Reading (in) Nineteenth-Century Literature

Abstract

Recently, there has been a growing number of scholarly attempts to ‘read’ the 19th century either through digital methods or, more specifically as a precursor to contemporary digital culture. The practice of reading is a category through which the two dimensions of spending time in and with the nineteenth century can be thought together. A focus on reading, as a way to spend time in/with the nineteenth century makes us aware of both the knowledge systems and methodologies of accessing and processing information, both in literary texts of that period and simultaneously in our own work. More specifically, my essay is interested in questions of ‘readability’ and the ‘crisis of reading’, as self-reflexively pronounced in two nineteenth century novels: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Frank Norris’s The Octopus. These novels, I argue, prefigure debates that are well-known to us and that materialize in the opposition between what Katherine Hayles has called “hyperreading” vs linear or immersive reading, between the New Critic’s formulation of close reading and what Franco Moretti has provocatively called “distant reading”, or the postcritical distinction between symptomatic and surface reading. By discussing different strategies of reading, the novels express the uncontrollability in view of increasing information environments. Yet, even if these webs of signification are elusive and at times dangerous, both novels, in a self-reflexive move, express a desire of writing the human reader into this web of signification and therefore to emphasize the significance of reading in an increasingly automated world.