10.6092/issn.2532-8816/8511
In questo articolo vengono proposte delle riflessioni sul distant reading in quanto metodo al momento tra i più favoriti sia nella ricerca sia nell'insegnamento della letteratura, riflessioni che si concentrano sul rapporto che il distant reading intrattiene con altri due concetti collegati, insieme alle relative interrelazioni, ossia il close e il surface reading. Il trattamento teorico del distant reading proposto in questa sede mostra i motivi per cui è strettamente legato al machine reading (parte dell'intelligenza artificiale), prestando una particolare attenzione al ruolo del lettore e sostenendo infine come il campo di studi noto come Digital Literary Studies possa trarre vantaggio dando una maggiore attenzione ai processi "naturali" di lettura effettuati dai singoli individui.
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Luc Herman
Umanistica Digitale
Artificial Intelligence
Can Machines Read (Literature)?
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https://umanisticadigitale.unibo.it/
Articles
2019-05-27
2018-08-28
2019-05-27
2020-05-19
Um. Dig.
Luc Herman
2019/05/27
10.6092/issn.2532-8816/8511
2532-8816
5
Artificial Intelligence
en
Williams, Jeffrey J. 2015. “The New Modesty in Literary Criticism.” Chronicle of Higher Education 9 January: B6-9.
Can Machines Read (Literature)?
https://umanisticadigitale.unibo.it/article/view/8511/9181
    Umanistica Digitale - ISSN:2532-8816 - n.5, 2019
M. Kestemont, L. Herman – Can Machines Read (Literature)?
DOI: https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/8511


                      Can Machines Read (Literature)?

                                   Mike Kestemont1 e Luc Herman2

                             Department of Literature, University of Antwerp
                                   1
                                       mike.kestemont@uantwerp.be
                                       2
                                         luc.herman@uantwerpen.be




       Abstract. In this essay, we reflect on distant reading as one of the various takes on reading
       that currently prevail in literary scholarship as well as the teaching of literature. We focus
       on three concepts of reading which for various reasons can be considered inter-related:
       close reading, surface reading and distant reading. We offer a theoretical treatment of
       distant reading and demonstrate why it is closely related to the concept of machine
       reading (part of artificial intelligence). Throughout, we focus on the role of the individual
       reader in all this and argue that Digital Literary Studies have much to gain from paying
       closer attention to the so-called “natural” reading process of individual humans.
       In questo articolo vengono proposte delle riflessioni sul distant reading in quanto metodo
       al momento tra i più favoriti sia nella ricerca sia nell'insegnamento della letteratura,
       riflessioni che si concentrano sul rapporto che il distant reading intrattiene con altri due
       concetti collegati, insieme alle relative interrelazioni, ossia il close e il surface reading. Il
       trattamento teorico del distant reading proposto in questa sede mostra i motivi per cui è
       strettamente legato al machine reading (parte dell'intelligenza artificiale), prestando una
       particolare attenzione al ruolo del lettore e sostenendo infine come il campo di studi noto
       come Digital Literary Studies possa trarre vantaggio dando una maggiore attenzione ai
       processi "naturali" di lettura effettuati dai singoli individui.




       Introduction

The Oxford Handbook of Reading (part of the Oxford Library of Psychology) has no trouble
whatsoever when it comes to a definition of reading. For the psychologists who contribute to
this volume, reading is all about “negotiating 'your' way through text” (24., 7). They
empirically analyze eye movement, printed word identification, the role of sound or phonology
in silent reading, and the processing of syntax. In the chapter “Models of Discourse
Comprehension,” Edward J. O’Brien and Anne E. Cook distinguish between two levels of
representation of a text, the “text-base,” which is “typically assumed to be in the form of


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connected propositions,” and the “situation model,” which “contains information explicitly
stated in the text as well as information from the reader’s general world knowledge that helps
fill in the fully intended meaning of the text” (23., 217-218). The development by the reader
of a coherent situation model, which is “the minimum requirement for successful
comprehension of text”, can be studied through the workings of memory, and that’s that. There
is indeed no need to think any further if your research goal is to advance reading instruction, to
which the Handbook devotes two of its five parts.
       The psychologists in the Oxford Handbook of Reading do not zoom in on the reading of
literature, which has engendered conceptualizations all its own. As a result of the digital
revolution, concepts of reading literature have in recent decades clearly gone beyond the
activities of human readers as they are empirically described in the Handbook. The presence of
Digital Humanities (DH) in literary studies has indeed been growing quickly. Whereas Stephen
Ramsay in 2003 still lamented the “inability of computing humanists to break into the
mainstream of literary critical scholarship” (25., 167), Adam Kirsch in 2014 published a widely
shared, yet controversial blog post warning that the “growth industry” of DH was already
taking over, if not altogether sweeping clean, entire English departments. 1 While Kirsch’s fairly
dramatic views have been heavily criticized in the online blogosphere, it is undeniable that
Digital Humanities have recently gained much momentum across the Geisteswissenschaften, and
literary studies more specifically as well.
       ‘Distant Reading’ has become a very popular term in the field of Digital Literary Studies
27. – at times, the term is even equated with the field itself. Unfortunately, this key term has
only rarely received in-depth theoretical treatment in DH, a domain which remains heavily
practice-oriented and in which some papers even deliberately postpone theorization and self-
reflection – a view countered by Bauer 1.. As a result, an increasingly wide gap has developed
between the practice of Digital Literary Studies today and more conventional literary criticism.
In this essay, we reflect on distant reading as one of the various takes on reading that currently
prevail in literary scholarship as well as the teaching of literature. Below, we discuss three,
related theoretical concepts of reading: close reading, surface reading and distant reading. The
latter, we argue, can increasingly be viewed as a form of artificial reading (i.e. reading
performed by an artificially intelligent agent), which naturally calls into question the analogies
and divergences with respect to the reading process of individual, human readers – the reading
process which one might call “natural”.
       Through focusing on the role of the reader, we point out the dangers of oversimplification
in which scholars caricaturize rather than characterize reading modes, for example, through
naïve oppositional pairs, such as close versus distant reading, which upon further inspection are
less obvious than one might expect. We conclude this essay by zooming in on the relative
absence in present-day Digital Literary Studies of theoretical considerations involving the
reader, which stands in stark contrast with the popularity of various cognitive approaches in the
literary criticism of the last fifty years, from the reader response criticism of the 60s and 70s 30.
to the contemporary study of reading fiction in neurobiology 12..



1 https://newrepublic.com/article/117428/limits-digital-humanities-adam-kirsch

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       Close reading

      The notion of close reading is still central to the teaching of literature all over the globe.
Close reading was developed and popularized in the 1940s and 50s by the American New
Critics, who pointed to the work of I.A. Richards and William Empson as sources of
inspiration. Essentially, close reading is heavily text-oriented: it is all about paying attention to
the formal details of a literary text. Without such a respectful and penetrating attitude, correct
interpretations are impossible, or so the practitioners of the method would like to hold. While
the method has led to some general suggestions (e.g. about the fundamental ambiguity of a
literary text, which often derives from the use of metaphor), close reading can in fact only be
taught by example because of its relative lack of discovery procedures that might help transfer
reading strategies from one text to another. This hasn’t prevented the notion from becoming
dominant as a cover term for the patient exploration of a literary text, which seems to remain
the most important teachable skill in courses on literature. As Rita Felski puts it in her
influential book Uses of Literature, “[t]he practice of close reading is tacitly viewed by many
literary scholars as the mark of their tribe—as what sets them apart, in the last instance, from
their like-minded colleagues in sociology or history” (10., 52).
      Especially in the United States, close reading is indeed still popular when there is a need
for a positive description of interpretive reading. The notion indicates a fundamental interest in
the literariness of a text, and as such it still provides a framework in spite of the more
ideological or ethically oriented treatment of literature that is currently required in most
American literature classrooms, certainly on the undergraduate level. The popularity of close
reading extends beyond this relatively carefree environment. A good example is the field of
medicine. After the narrative turn 15., structuralist narratology sought to branch out by
transcending its focus on literary narrative. Conversely, some disciplines have turned to
narratology for a set of tools to analyze narratives as they function in their field. In order to
describe its method for engaging with the stories of patients, narrative medicine has looked
even beyond this toolkit and realized that what they are really interested in is a form of close
reading. In The Principles and Practices of Narrative Medecine, Rita Charon describes close
reading as the “signature method” of her discipline (5., 157). Its core is “attentive and accurate
listening in a clinical practice” (ibid.). Although the effects of the methodology apparently
remain hard to explain (“Many mysterious processes occur through close reading” (5., 170)),
and the set of elements to devote attention to in a narrative (time, space, voice and metaphor)
remains quite conventional, the book by Charon and her colleagues harbors a deep belief that
close reading perfectly underwrites the principles of narrative medicine: “(1) action toward
social justice; (2) disciplinary rigor; (3) inclusivity; (4) tolerance of ambiguity; (5) participatory
and nonhierarchical methods” (172). As such, the book provides a perfect illustration of the
ethical drive that comes along with the current uses of close reading, first and foremost in the
literature classroom. What the teacher eventually teaches through careful analysis is perhaps not



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so much an eye for literary detail, but rather the capacity to find value while respecting both
the text and the other members of the community in which that text is being read.



       Surface reading

      ‘Surface reading’ has become the dominant container term for methods of reading
literature that no longer look for the hidden meaning of a text. Close reading, as we have just
seen, may have turned into an ethical undertaking, but it is definitely still geared to finding a
meaning (typically through a focus on form) that is not immediately apparent. Similarly,
methods deriving from Marx and post-Marxism are primarily interested in revealing the
ideological aspects of any literary text. While close reading springs from an interest in
literariness as defined through form, and (post-)Marxist readings derive from a specific world
view, they both constitute instances of “symptomatic reading” (3., 3-9) because they are on the
look-out for symptoms, clues or keys to what is ‘really’ in the text – a particular type of
metaphor or a coded sign of the master/slave relationship. (Post-)Marxist, (post-)feminist or
queer critics may have (legitimately) criticized the elitism of close reading in its original guise,
but all these ways of reading are digging for meaning below the surface of the text. Coined by
Sharon Marcus in her book Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian
England 16., and further developed by Marcus and Stephen M. Best in their introduction to a
special issue of the journal Representations (2009), surface reading is less ambitious and
concentrates on “what is evident, perceptible, apprehensible in texts” 9.. As Jeffrey J. Williams
puts it, “the critic is no longer like a detective who doesn’t trust the suspect but more the social
scientist who describes the manifest statements of a text” (32., 7).
      Best and Marcus present the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson as the champion of
symptomatic reading in that he attacks “weak, descriptive, empirical, ideologically complicit
readers” for not “rewrit[ing] narrative in terms of master codes, disclosing its status as ideology,
as an imaginary resolution of real contradictions” (Jameson 1981, 13; as presented in 3., 5).
They object that the surface of a text can be studied in its own right, without necessarily
leading to complicity – perhaps the worst mistake from the point of view of a Marxist
intellectual: “A surface is what insists on being looked at rather than what we must train
ourselves to see through” (3., 9). ‘Surface’ has many meanings. It can refer to materiality of the
book or the reading process and as such it can be likened to the New or Material Philology
movement, with its focus on tangible traces of reader response 22.. It can also relate to “the
intricate verbal structure of literary language” 26., which implies a modest form of New
Criticism but strikingly forgets that the New Critics haven’t always been so modest in their
search for meaning. In a slightly more mystifying way, ‘surface’ can also lead to a refusal of
meaning in favor of Susan Sontag’s “erotics of reading” (1966) which “can take the form of
attending to the text, or to one’s affective responses to it” (3., 10).
      Best and Marcus add three more types “of doing surface reading” (3., 11). Scholars can
pay “attention to surface as a practice of critical description” instead of applying a theory to it.
“Depth,” in other words, “is continuous with surface and is thus an effect of immanence”.
Scholars can also turn to ‘surface’ as “the location of patterns that exists within and across


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texts”. The prime example of this practice is supposed to be narratology, which allegedly looks
for patterns without a desire for interpretation. As we have already indicated in our previous
section, this basic ambition of narratology has led to a toolkit that undergirds interpretations in
literary classrooms all over the world. With narratology, therefore, it seems difficult to say
where surface stops and depth begins. Finally, Best and Marcus point to ‘surface’ as “literal
meaning” (3., 12). Presence doesn’t have to mean absence (as it does in ‘symptomatic reading’),
nor does affirmation have to mean negation. In Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and
Marriage in Victorian England, for instance, Marcus shows that in Victorian fiction, female
friendship is not cancelled by courtship plots (as ‘symptomatic reading’ might like to suggest)
but remains central to what the text conveys.
      All of these types of ‘surface reading’ clearly share an aversion to ‘symptomatic’ reading.
The difference between the two may sometimes not be so clear, but more importantly, ‘surface
reading’ paradoxically takes the moral high road for which it reproaches its ‘symptomatic’
opponent. When Best and Marcus realize that “surface reading, which strives to describe texts
accurately, might easily be dismissed as politically quietist, too willing to accept things as they
are” (3., 16), they fall back on an ethical stance similar to the one we have already encountered
in the contemporary versions of close reading: “We want to reclaim from this tradition the
accent on immersion in texts […], for we understand that attentiveness to the artwork as itself
a kind of freedom” (3., 16). Through paying close attention to the surface, readers can
transcend the imperatives and limitations of their situation and reach a state of mind that is
“equally valuable, if less glamorous” than that which results from “the work of demystification”
in ‘symptomatic reading’ (3., 17). In other words, ‘surface reading’ is close reading without the
burning desire to interpret.



       Distant reading

      Distant reading is a term which has been proposed in an influential series of essays by
Franco Moretti, first published in the New Left Review (2000), and which have been reprinted
(and concisely commented on) in the collection Distant Reading 21.. The introduction of the
term must be understood against the backdrop of Moretti’s interests as a (Marxist) scholar of
comparative literature, and more specifically the ambitious notion of World Literature, which
been gaining much traction in recent years (e.g. 9.). In “Conjectures on World Literature,”
Moretti offers a typically comparatist plea for a more inclusive study of literature, namely one
which would go beyond the obligatory canon of well-known (English-language) authors and
which would be extended to what Margaret Cohen has called the “great unread” (6., 23).
However, to reach or even approximate this objective, Moretti claims that “simply reading
more” is unfeasible. He proposes instead a ‘second-hand’ approach to reading, in which
scholars must dare to rely more extensively on ‘a patchwork of other people’s research, without
a single direct textual reading’ (20., 57; Moretti’s italics). Only through such a cascaded – and
perhaps in some ways ‘parasitic’? – reading practice world literature can be studied on the scale
it deserves, Moretti claims.



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      However, such an increase in scope has implications, Moretti stresses: the more we read,
the more shallow our reading must become: ‘the ambition is now directly proportional to the
distance from the text: the more ambitious the project, the greater must the distance be’ (ibid.).
As such, distance becomes a function of scope, and negatively correlates with it. Moretti goes
on to oppose this project to the practice of close reading: “the trouble with close reading (in all
of its incarnations, from the new criticism to deconstruction) is that it necessarily depends on
an extremely small canon” (20., 57). Moretti sees close reading as “a theological exercise—very
solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously” (ibid.) and, therefore, does not see it fit
for a more inclusive, let alone exhaustive, study of world literature. Following the trend
described in our section on close reading, Moretti does not restrict his reproach to the sort of
‘close reading’ as historically practiced by the New Critics; rather, he seems to equate the term
with all forms of careful and sustained reading at large (cf. ‘a direct textual reading’). To some
extent, and probably for rhetorical effects, one should acknowledge that Moretti here sketches a
slightly unrealistic caricature of traditional literary criticism.
      Thus, in the seminal essay “Conjectures on World Literature,’ distant reading is perhaps
primarily defined negatively, implying the absence of a ‘a single direct textual reading’ in the
analysis of literary works. This point of view is mirrored in the term ‘not-reading’, which has
been used by a theorist such as Matthew Kirschenbaum 14.. He borrowed the term from
Martin Mueller, who stressed that the endeavour of ‘not-reading’, viz. ‘distant reading’, is in
itself hardly novel: “there are age-old techniques for doing this, some more respectable than
others, and they include skimming or eyeballing the text, reading a bibliography or following
what somebody else says or writes about it. Knowing how to “not-read” is just as important as
knowing how to read” (Mueller, qtd. in 14.).
      The fact that Moretti did not strictly define his concept of Distant Reading, apart from
the absence of direct readings, has allowed subsequent scholars to come up with their own
interpretations. It is a well-known fact that the concept of “Distant Reading” has quickly
surged to popularity in DH. Existing approaches in DH such as computational stylistics, have
been quick to appropriate the term to refer to their own work, and so it seems on its way to
gradually replace alternatives as “algorithmic criticism” 26.. It would not be an exaggeration to
say that many studies in DH have used the term in a fairly sloganesque, if not shallow fashion,
with little theoretical grounding or reflection on the implications of the term. That is not
necessarily a bad thing, because many digital humanists have anecdotally described that they
have experienced the practice-oriented environment of DH as ‘liberating’, freeing them from
the burden or even intimidation of theory (7., 15). In DH, it seems like the term Distant
Reading has rapidly become an umbrella term for all forms of computational text analysis,
including those for corpora such as newspaper archives, which are not normally considered to
be particularly literary in nature. Through this broadening of source materials, DH clearly
echoes the New Historicism (e.g. 11.).
      Nevertheless, one should stress that the practice of distant reading does not presuppose the
use of computers at all – in line with theoreticians as McCarty 17. who pointed to other
characteristic attributes of DH. This is in fact true for many applications in DH: one could in
principle carry them out by hand, although that would in many cases be tedious. In fact, it is
surprising to observe that computers or digital methods are not even once explicitly mentioned


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yet in Moretti’s earliest essays. For Moretti, distant reading initially meant reading on the basis
of other readings, and not necessarily, let alone exclusively, reading via computer applications.
For him, the scope of the reading endeavor mattered more than the method – which also helps
explain why he later wrote that he briefly considered to use the term serial reading (21., 44). It
should therefore be stressed that the strictly computational interpretation of distant reading has
only been created post hoc.



        Artificial Reading

       In the notion of distant reading, Moretti essentially theorized a two-tier reading process,
in which we would base our “secondary”, “parasitic” reading of texts on a “primary”, actual
reading of those texts, which we do not perform ourselves. The primary reading stage has so far
been interpreted in two ways: the ‘secondary’ reading is based on (a) the reported insights of
other people, or (b) the results derived from a computational text analysis. In DH, a quick
perusal of the abstracts of the annual global DH conference already shows that (b) outranks (a)
in popularity. In both cases, however, distant reading is a two-tier process, where the secondary
reading depends on a primary “model” (simulation, approximation etc.; cf. 18.) of a first-hand
reading process, be it computational or not.
       The two interpretations of the primary reading stage primarily differ as to whether there is
still a human agent included in the first tier. Another terminology to capture this distinction is
to differentiate between the sort of agent to which the first-hand reading is ‘outsourced’ in
distant reading: we can distinguish between (a) a natural, human reader, and (b) an artificial,
computer reader. (Here we speak of “natural” reading, in the same way that this adjective is
used in the phrase ‘natural language processing’, to avoid ambiguity with, among others,
computer languages. Likewise, we use the term ‘artificial’ as it is used in the familiar collocation
‘Artificial Intelligence’.) Definition (b) is of course intriguing from a cognitive perspective,
because here a computational agent is used to replace the human agents involved in the
primary reading (a). The assumption is thus implicit that some form of algorithmic procedure
is able to offer a usable model of the human reading experience, i.e. artificial reading as a form
of artificial intelligence.
       In the first chapter of their classic text book on Artificial Intelligence, Russell and Norvig
(28., 4-5) propose a fourfold typology of the different definitions of the goals of AI (here
partially reproduced as Table 1). These definitions vary along two axes:

                                    Human                               Rational
 Think                              Systems that think like             Systems that think
                                    humans.                             rationally.
 Act                                Systems that act like               Systems that act rationally.
                                    humans.
Table 1: Definitions of Artificial Intelligence along two axes (reproduced from Russell and Norvig 1995,
4-5).




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      Where does distant reading fit into this typology? The opposition between thinking and
acting in this table seems hard to apply to human reading. Especially since the rise of reader
response theory, literary scholars seem to have reached a consensus that reading necessarily
involves an active role of the reader in the form of interpretation. Interpretation clearly involves
thinking, but whether interpretation also involves a minimal form of deliberate ‘acting’ on the
reader’s side is a much fuzzier issue. The opposition between the Human and Rational
columns, however, is more interesting. The authors say: “[T]he definitions on the left measure
success in terms of human performance, whereas the ones on the right measure against an ideal
concept of intelligence, which we will call rationality. A system is rational if it does the right
thing” (28., 5).
      Let us for a brief moment consider artificial reading as an essential component of general
artificial intelligence – theoretically, it makes perfect sense that the ultimate AI implies the
machine’s ability to read, interpret and discuss literary texts (cf. 31.). We can then raise the
naive question which modelling task is to be preferred in the light of the previous definitions.
Do we want computers to read like humans, and should we model their behaviour after that of
existing, individual readers? Or do we evaluate a machine’s ability against a concept of an ideal
intelligence, i.e. the “rational” reading capacities of an omniscient, neutral, and probably a-
historical reader, who always reads in the ‘right’ way? The quest to develop such a “God
Reader” seems shockingly naive from the point of view of literary theory: many scholars will
nowadays hold that there is no other reading beyond individual reading, and the profound
individuality of the reading process renders it questionable whether we would even be able to
recognize a “perfect rationality” in reading if we were to attain it by accident.
      This calls into question where we should in fact situate distant reading in literary theory.
The use of the word ‘reading’ – even if only metaphorically – in the phrase would suggest that
distant reading is more a matter of hermeneutics, than poetics – to use Culler’s terminology 7.,
more a matter of meaning, than form. In the everyday practice of Distant Reading, however,
we know of very few examples where (individual) hermeneutics play a role of significance, a
point also raised by Martindale 19..



       Readers

      Let us recapitulate. Above we have briefly sketched the rise of Distant Reading as an
important and novel conception of (literary) reading in the previous years. Although originally
not intended as such, its current usage entails a form of Artificial Reading or Machine Reading,
since readers outsource a significant part of the traditional reading process to a machine.
Human interpretation will still be a required part of the process in most applications, but it
happens at the level of the output of a computational reading process, i.e. the simplified model
of a text corpus that it has yielded.
      The limitations of current computer technology also limit the complexity of the analyses
at this point in time: often techniques essentially boil down to an advanced form of “word
counting” that might beat a human in processing scope but rarely in hermeneutic quality – the
notorious Google Books paper 13. is a text book example in this respect. Even as more advanced


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techniques from distributional semantics – and their admittedly impressive results – are now
entering the stage (e.g. 29.), one should not overestimate the hermeneutic depth that machines
can currently reach. In a situation characterized by a fundamental shallowness, distant reading
and surface reading appear as children of the same Zeitgeist, although potentially for different
reasons: whereas surface readers deliberately choose to stick to a text’s surface, distant readers
are currently still practically hindered by the lack of suitable technology to produce deeper
readings of texts, even if they wanted to dig beneath a text’s symptomatic surface. At the same
time, the value of the textual surface is clearly recognized by digital humanists. Modern
stylometry, for instance, often praises counting simple function words as a preferred gateway
into a text. John Burrows, one of the pioneers of stylometry, famously said, with a reference to
Jane Austen (4., 1): “It is a truth not generally acknowledged that, in most discussions of works
of English fiction, we proceed as if a third, two-fifths, a half of our material were not really
there”.
      How does the value of ‘surface reading’ relate to “the recent turn to […] machine
intelligence across a range of fields and practices, from book history to distant reading” (3.,
17)? Best and Marcus welcome this development, as long as human readers get the upper hand:
“We are not envisioning a world in which computers replace literary critics but are curious
about one in which we work with them to expand what we do” (3., 17). In other words,
computers can be made to pay attention to the surface, and the humanist endeavor of criticism
essentially remains in place. In contrast to the sciences, “which focus on processes beyond our
creation and control,” the study of culture is defined by our “interest in human artifacts,” and a
practice like distant reading nicely fits that undertaking. For many such applications in Digital
Literary Studies, as in surface reading, the text’s surface clearly suffices and scholars feel no need
to dig deeper.
      Nevertheless, if we would focus on more ambitious forms of machine reading, that is,
machine reading as artificial intelligence, the question becomes what its ultimate goal should
be: is it feasible – or even desirable – to develop a perfectly rational “God Reader”, or do we
ultimately aim to simulate the actual reading process of a (specific, individual) human being?
Generally speaking, distant reading is not tied to a specific computational methodology and
various text processing techniques have been accepted as valid operationalizations of it, ranging
from the simple word counting in culturomics, over dimension reduction techniques in
stylometry to the distributional methods developed by computational semantics. If we abstract
from their individual differences, these techniques understandably remain heavily text-oriented:
in the end, they primarily yield models of texts (and to some extent: their producers) rather
than models of readers, in the sense that texts are analyzed without taking into account that
texts can invite different responses from different (communities of ) readers.
      Distant reading as currently practiced, is to a considerable extent an unsituated,
uncontextualized form of reading, in that most of its instantiations stay far away from even
attempting to mimic actual human reading, which is by definition situated and context-driven.
Distant reading is single-model reading – God Reading – whereas a more profound reader-
awareness would depend on a plurality of heterogeneous models. This relative lack of “reader
awareness” feels somewhat uncomfortable after the turn of the twentieth century, in which one




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of the primary insights yielded by literary theory was the general relativity of reading: reading is
always done by a specific individual against a specific historic backdrop.
      Interestingly, close reading, as practiced by the school of New Critics, the paradigm
against which Moretti so heavily revolted, might have suffered from similar weaknesses: it too
was heavily text oriented and did not stimulate the production of new readings; it was literally
taught by example, in the sense that authoritative readings were meant to be reproduced, instead
of produced. It too, was an uncontextualized approach of literature that stressed the long life of
literature. In the words of Bertens, who characterizes Matthew Arnold as a forerunner of the
New Critics (and an excellent representative of Liberal Humanism at large):

       The classics and the ideal of culture that they embody are timeless for Arnold. This is a
       vitally important point: ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’, whether to
       be found in the classics or in later writers, is the best for every age and every place (2., 7).

     For many New Critics too, it appears that they strove for God Reading, rather than actual
reading. For Eliot, poetry was “profoundly impersonal” and sterile, stripped of all
autobiographism and personal emotion (2., 13-14). For all its revolt against close reading – and
notwithstanding a list of other differences – it is clear that distant reading, at least in this
aspect, closely mimics the New Critical endeavour. At the same time, this striking lack of reader
awareness presents interesting opportunities for future research in Distant Reading.



       Acknowledgements

     This paper is an English translation of a Dutch-language article that will appear in a
themed issue of the Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde [2019]. The authors would
like to thank Federico Meschini (Università degli Studi della Tuscia) and Greta Franzini
(University College London) for their help in translating the abstract to Italian.



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Last access URLs: 4 April 2018




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