In Which We Learn That Some Critics Call Any Literary Artifacts Poems By Harriet Staff 5-20-13_Paper Neat-o, huh? According to this recent Inside Higher Ed article by Scott McLemee, in which he reviews Mathew L. Jockers’s new book, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods & Literary History (University of Illinois Press), “some critics apply the word ‘poem’ to any literary artifact.” The article begins: “A poem,” wrote William Carlos Williams toward the end of World War II, “is a small (or large) machine of words.” I’ve long wondered if the good doctor — Williams was a general practitioner in New Jersey who did much of his writing between appointments – might have come up with this definition out of weariness with the flesh and all its frailties. Traditional metaphors about “organic” literary form usually imply a healthy and developing organism, not one infirm and prone to messes. The poetic mechanism is, in Williams’s vision, “pruned to a perfect economy,” and there is “nothing sentimental about a machine.” Built for efficiency, built to last. The image this evoked 70 years ago was probably that of an engine, clock, or typewriter. Today it’s more likely to be something with printed circuits. And a lot of poems in literary magazines now seem true to form in that respect: The reader has little idea how they work or what they do, but the circuitry looks intricate, and one assumes it is to some purpose. I had much the same response to the literary scholarship Matthew L. Jockers describes and practices in Macroanalysis: Digital Methods & Literary History (University of Illinois Press). Jockers is an assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. The literary material he handles is prose fiction — mostly British, Irish, and American novels of the 18th and 19th centuries — rather than poetry, although some critics apply the word “poem” to any literary artifact. In the approach Jockers calls “macroanalysis,” the anti-sentimental and technophile attitude toward literature defines how scholars understand the literary field, rather than how authors imagine it. The effect, in either case, is both tough-minded and enigmatic. Following Franco Moretti’s program for extending literary history beyond the terrain defined by the relatively small number of works that remain in print over the decades and centuries, Macroanalysis describes “how a new method of studying large collections of digital material can help us to understand and contextualize the individual works within those collections.” All things macro and more at Inside Higher Ed. Tags: Inside Higher Ed, macroanalysis, William Carlos Williams Posted in Poetry News on Monday, May 20th, 2013 by Harriet Staff.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Jul 2013 16:31:50 +0000
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