Literature, Digital Humanities, and the Age of the Encyclopedia

Abstract

In this article I argue that, in case Digital Humanities are looking for an anthem text, Robert Musil's (1930) The Man without Qualities is worthy of consideration. Musil's modernist novel is the first novel written from the perspective of information overload; at the same time, it mounts a passionate defense of the importance of technology, routines and unsupervised procedures even in dealing with culture and the world of letters. In order to substantiate these claims, I relate some of the fears accompanying literature's renewed exposure to media and technology with similar discussions in early modernity. This historical perspective allows to identify and link three specific discourses underpinning the debate on the future of reading and the book, namely: education, rhetoric, and the concept of the encyclopedia. The encyclopedia is a model of writing that foregrounds such cultural techniques as metadata and collaborative authorship that can be grouped under the common denominator of transliteracy (which is the tokenization of a specific media text in view of its potential transcription into other media). The new methods and tools developed by Digital Humanities may be frowned upon by established philology. But they will meet with more widespread approval if they are properly situated within their shared historical background, namely the study of rhetoric and the cultural history of the encyclopedia and the encyclopedic novel as a tool for organizing and visualizing knowledge.