Figures of Reading

Abstract

Figures of Reading Nathan K. Hensley (bio) Garrett Stewart , Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. 268. $45.00 cloth. If you've browsed the Internet or visited a blog at any point in the past decade, then you probably already know that reading is dead. Doomsday reports in the popular and academic presses conspire with our own daily experience, as we tweet and text (or don't), to suggest that the data-processing function called reading has morphed forever into browsing, skimming, multitasking. These shifts in everyday life have found institutional corollaries in literary studies, as older methods now feel called upon to justify their relevance in the face of new processes like data mining, information aggregating, n-gramming. "Today," says Franco Moretti with ambiguous tone, "we can replicate in a few minutes investigations that took a giant like Leo Spitzer months and years of work."1 Moretti is citing a study in Science heralding a new species of technological reading, "Culturomics"—a rival, it would appear, to his own. Such advances in literary numerology transform quality to quantity on a massive scale, reconceiving reading as data analysis, hermeneutics as information science. With just a keystroke on Google's Ngram website, anyone can graph a word's frequency in printed books since 1500—or at least those scanned by Google—test driving what even the New York Times now calls "Humanities 2.0."2 Depending on how you view it, this transformation has either [End Page 329] chipped away at what makes the humanities human or helped outfit English for a renovated world. Within the discipline, the digital turn has generated dynamic new subfields, but has also enabled critics in historical areas to rethink reading from the ground up. Led by Nicholas Dames, Caroline Levine, Alan Liu, Deidre Lynch, Mary Poovey, and Leah Price, these critics have reached beyond new historicism and cultural studies to examine our place in the history of reading and to question the metaphors that define—or should define—our engagement with text-based information. Should the reading we do be close or distant? Deep or superficial? Fast or slow? And is literature information or something, well, better? In a much-discussed 2009 special issue of Representations called "The Way We Read Now," Sharon Marcus and Steven Best catalog alternatives to the interpretive reading-for-depth they claim has become orthodox in literary studies.3 Their proposal, surface reading, combines methods that linger instead on the manifest, the tactile: from book history and autotelic formalism to Marcus's just reading,4 a theoretically elaborated version of what students sometimes call not reading too much into it. Leah Price, for her part, suggests "we do not, and need not, read books at all."5 Against such invocations of surface and speed are arrayed defenses of the deep and slow. Thus, for example, Jane Gallop has indexed the losses already suffered by fine-grained reading and called for a reinvigorated curriculum of closeness. For Gallop, intimate reading at small scales defeats preconceived notions of what a text "will probably say," short-circuiting prewired expectations. This ability to register particularity is the very justification for teaching literature in the first place—and not, as the New Critics had it, the other way around.6 In ways Best and Marcus do not, Gallop therefore makes explicit that by redrawing the boundaries of what reading is and should be, critics also (whether they like it or not) take positions on larger questions about the nature of the humanities in the contemporary marketplace of ideas. If the new austerity has made humanities an endangered species, does a shift to what has been called distant reading hasten or slow their extinction? In a universe organized according to principles of numbers-based rationality, should literary analysis become more efficient, more transparent, more informational—or less so?7 Without citing any of this, Garrett Stewart's new book intervenes into recent debates about reading by showing how the slow and deep can share space with the quick and new. Despite its own claims, Novel Violence is less an investigation into violence or an announcement of a new...