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Vol. 3: Contents

Computers, Writing, Rhetoric and Literature

John Slatin
Director, Institute of Technology and Learning
Director, Computer Writing and Research Laboratories
University of Texas at Austin

La Zambinella Meets the Cyborg: Barthes, S/Z, and Print-Based Literary Studies

Link to our discussion forum on Issues in Electronic and Print-Based Literary Scholarship

Introduction

  1. Computer-based classrooms are proliferating, but computers have hardly made a dent in literary scholarship, despite a small but steady stream of computer-assisted literary analyses published since the 1960s (Fortier, 1990; quoted in BD [Bill Diedrich? Bdiederi@artsci.wust1.edu], "Fortier Intraloquium: Computers and Literary Studies," H-NET List on Computers in Literary Studies, H-CLC. Date: 1996, May 28) and a "massive turn to word processing" over the past decade (McGann, 1995). Many scholars in English Studies continue to believe that computers are of only "marginal significance" to the field.

  2. There are many reasons for this state of affairs, not least among them the fact that many who choose careers in English share the anti-technological bias of the Sutherlands in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974). I have no interest in banging my head against that wall, real as it is. First of all, it will come down with the changing of the generational guard (graduate students tend to be much more fully "wired" than their professors are). But even if the attitudinal barrier were suddenly to disappear, it would take some time for computer-based critical practices to emerge. The main thrust of my argument is that such practices can not develop until a much larger body of text is available online than is presently the case.

  3. There are important projects going forward that involve an unprecedented degree of cooperation not only among faculty within individual departments, but also across departmental and other boundaries within specific institutions, and even among institutions. Coupled with changes in academic publishing brought about by increasing production costs coupled with reduced acquisition budgets at university libraries and reduced federal and foundation support (see Shulevitz, 29 October 1995), these projects will transform scholarly practice in the next generation.

  4. It is also the case, however, that for the past twenty-five years computers have played a far more important role in shaping our collective understanding of textuality and the practices appropriate to it than we usually acknowledge. One factor in the emergence of critical theory as the dominant discourse of contemporary literary study appears to be a second- or even third-level ripple effect of the computer's presence in areas of social, intellectual, and economic activity seemingly quite remote from literature. We may regard the recent history of critical theory as a series of perturbations (competing theories, emergent sub-fields) whose particular characteristics are specific to the broad domain of inquiry in which they occur. To take this view is to construct that history as an aspect of print-based criticism's self-organizing response to analogous re-organizations of knowledge occurring as computers are introduced into other disciplines (Lyotard, 1979; Pagels, 1989; Campbell, 1982; Zuboff, 1988; Haraway, 1991). Contemporary theory is a textualizing, in Zuboff's terms, or rather a continuous re-textualizing, of disciplinary knowledge about the nature of textuality and its associated practices and habits of mind.

  5. There are important distinctions to be made here, however. What Zuboff calls textualization leads to the development of computer-based procedures and systems designed to replace oral knowledge and paper records alike, and to enable machines (whether "hard" or "soft") to carry out functions previously executable only by humans. By contrast, in the case of literary study the textualizing process has so far remained print-bound even (or perhaps especially) where efforts at automating all or part of the scholar's work are most advanced. I do not mean to imply a teleology: I do not think that computer-based scholarly practice is the logical, necessary end toward which print-based criticism has been tending all along. I do want to offer what is to me an interesting observation, which I shall discuss at greater length later on: that even the efforts to computerize key aspects of literary scholarship have so far worked to inhibit the transformation of material from print to electronic form, freezing the text in an image of unitary wholeness even while blowing it to smithereens.

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