On Not Already Knowing

Abstract

Criticism 63.4_07_Porter.indd Page 445 17/11/21 6:51 pm Criticism Fall 2021, Vol. 63, No. 4, pp. 445–448. ISSN 0011-1589. doi: 10.13110/criticism.63.4.0445 © 2021 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309 Distant Horizons collects about a decade of cutting-edge literary digital humanities (DH) work into a concise, accessible volume. The five chapters work equally well as standalone experiments or in the service of Ted Underwood’s overarching argument that DH reconfigures our understanding of literary history. It’s a clear must read for anyone working in literary DH (especially text mining) or in literary history more generally, and when it is inevitably added to dozens of syllabi, both students and teachers will find a lot to admire. Yet the most profound achievement of the book is its demonstration of a genuinely new kind of literary critical knowledge. This is not quite how Underwood casts it, though. He focuses on two methodological interventions made possible by the DH approach. First, there is the familiar issue of scale— the capacity of DH to tackle thousands of texts spread across centuries of production. Underwood argues that this new scale of attention fundamentally changes our understanding of literary history, writing that “we have narrated literary history as a sequence of discrete movements and periods because chunks of that size are about as much of the past as a single person could remember and discuss at one time” (ix). The digital approach, he says, enables us to consider changes that are too long term, slow moving, or widely dispersed to have been visible ON NOT ALREADY KNOWING J. D. Porter