Something Called Digital Humanities

Abstract

For these purposes, the online edition of The Nation is just the thing. And so one day I found myself reading a lament about the present and future of academic English departments. William Deresiewicz’s ‘Professing Literature in 2008’1 is ostensibly a review of a new reissue of Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature. As such, I found it to be trenchant enough,if not about its subject (which it merely glances at, and I have never read) then about its world (which preoccupies it, and with which, at one time, I was very familiar). It stood out in my mind for two things. There was a tidy analogy: by the author’s account, the curricula now offered in English departments are fragmented by fashion and identity politics to such an extent as to reflect nothing so much as efforts, ingenuous or not, to win students by flattery. “If grade schools behaved like this, every subject would be recess, and lunch would consist of chocolate cake.” And by way of depicting the symptoms of the problem, there is an interesting summary of how this fragmentation manifests itself in the want ads posted by departments in the annual mLA Job Information List. “Contemporary lit, global lit, ethnic American lit; creative writing, film, eco-criticism – whatever. There are postings here for positions in science fiction, in fantasy literature, in children’s literature, even in something called ‘digital humanities’.”