Underwood 2013

Underwood, Ted. Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.

The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization

literary historians took up Foucault because he was saying what the discipline already did -- "Foucauldian 'genealogy' may have been controversial in history departments, but in literary study it offered an eloquent, philosophical rationale for an approach to history that was already dominant." (134)

blind spot in the discipline -- "widespread amnesia about the whole history of the discipline before New Criticism" (134)

"Until Gerald Graff wrote Professing Literature, many late-20th-century histories of literary study were actually histories 'of literary criticism,' constructing an imaginary genealogy of the discipline that ran from Matthew Arnold thorugh the likes of T. S. Eliot, and largely ignoring the institutional history of the university curriculum. It's especially worth addressing this oversight now, because there are growing signs that literary study may be about to rehearse early-20th-century debates bout the threat of 'scientism' and 'factualism' in our discipline." (135)

Stories of Parallel Lives

last 40 years haven't abandoned a sense of historical continuity "but have been characterized on the contrary by a growing confidence in continuity. Cultural intellectuals have rightly perceived this as a crisis, however, because the prestige of historical cultivation has long hinged -- as parallel-lives stories remind us -- on the premise of discontinuity. If history is radically discontinuous then intellectuals can argue that present-day social standards have to be qualified by historicist culture, which serves as a placeholder for an infinite variety of possible alternate perspectives." If, on the other hand, we have reached a point where the present is finally right to imagine that it holds a privileged perspective, then the supplement of historical cultivation (of 'culture' as we have known it for the last two centuries) is no longer particularly urgent." (156)

Digital Humanities and the Future of Literary History

"the topic of gradual change is a place where there is a specific, interlocking affinity between the new capacities of digital analysis and the existing blind spots of literary scholarship." (159)

despite rhetoric of fragmentation and rupture as radical, "literary study has consistently located cultural prestige in moments of rupture rather than gradual and continuous change" (163)

quantification in humanities seen as a form of scientism; "but I would argue that many complaints about scientism boil down in practice to a suspicion that quantification will dissolve the kinds of discontinuity that serve as containers for the cultural value of history" (164)

"'distant reading' does also have the potential to trouble literary historicism more profoundly, because quantification can make it possible to describe change without articulating it as a series of discrete phases at all" (166)

"Instead of ascribing a causal role to literary movements like 'romanticism' or genres like 'the realist novel,' it might be better to say that those genres and movements were themselves participating in broader discursive trends. Trends of this kind play out on a scale that literary scholars aren't accustomed to describing, and it may take decades for us to figure out how to describe them." (169)

"I think this is one of the most significant pitfalls contronting digital scholarship in our discipline: the assumption that quantitative methods need to prove their value by answering the kinds of questions a more traditional interpretive agenda would have posed." (170)

"Recent moves toward 'distant' or 'quantitative' reading can provide a healthy methodological diversification for literary studies -- a counterweight to our long-established preference for case studies and contrast. But in order for that diversification to work, we need to let quantitative methods do what they do best: map broad patterns and trace gradients of change. That is harder than it sounds, because literary scholars are not trained to appreciate gradients. Results of that kind can look like a scientistic intrusion into our discipline: it's easy to feel that the results would be better and more humanistic if only they were less abstract, less impersonal, less continuous." (170)

makes more sense to apply quantitative methods to large-scale analysis, of the kinds humans can't do ; need to "overcome skepticism not just about quantitative evidence, but about historical continuity as such" (171)

"Many disciplines are interested in social behavior, or processes of change, or ways of discerning patterns in large collections of data. It has already become difficult to separate literary scholarship from linguistics, history, and sociology. It now appears that the discipline could overlap in places ith computer science. In other words, the consequence of reframing literary historicism more broadly might not be that 'periods' disappear, but that literary history becomes ever more permeable to other disciplines." (171)