Close or distant reading? – ON literary interpretation in the digital age

Prof. Anton Pokrivčák, University of Trnava, Slovakia

Abstract: In literary studies, the turn to digital technology has generated great enthusiasm, especially on the part of younger and more technologically savvy literary scholars, but also significant concerns among traditional scholars fearful of new approaches that could, as they claim, potentially change established methods of work with literary texts. While traditional scholarship is in favour of approaches drawing on the analysis or interpretation of individual texts, very often referred to as close reading, that is, in favour of approaching the text as a relatively independent object creating meaning primarily through the interaction of its textual elements, promoters of digital approaches concentrate on the so-called distant reading. Distant reading tends to ignore the individual text because, as it is often claimed, we can read only a few texts during our professional careers, and thus, our conclusions must be based only on a minimal selection of texts, inevitably becoming subjective and non-representative. In the current debates about digital literary studies, “closeness vs. distance” seems to be the central issue. It is argued that distant reading is what computers are only capable of, while close reading is based only on a small data set, unable to provide a more comprehensive picture. Moreover, the concept of distant reading has provoked a question of whether it is a reading at all, that is, in the sense of engaging in detail with an author´s imaginative work.

In its first part, this paper focuses on analysing the basic tenets of literary scholarship and its confrontation with approaches that are beginning to make increased use of digital tools to engage with literary texts. Even though no one thinks that digitisation has not influenced the creation of literary works, their reception, transmission, and preservation in libraries and archives, the question of whether their study should also be digitised remains open and problematic. Why might digitisation have trouble penetrating the study of literature if it is ubiquitous in our lives? The answer could be found in the nature of literature and its traditional research, as well as in the subjective abilities of the direct actors of this research, i.e. the literary scholars, whose professional training is humanistic, not technical, not allowing the majority of them to work, at a higher level of expertise, with modern digital devices.

The second part of the article deals with the analysis of Emily Dickinson's work based on texts and other materials contained in the Dickinson Electronic Archives. This analysis is compared with a classical (close) reading of Dickinson's poems. The author concludes by pointing out the positives, as well as negatives, of studying literature using digital tools. If the positives are mainly on the side of the literary process (including improved access to and work with literary texts), a significant negative is the inability of digital technologies to penetrate into the deep layers of an individual literary work.

Keywords: digital, humanities, literary, studies, American, interpretation, close reading, distant reading