Literary criticism and literary computing: The difficulties of a synthesis

✍ Scribed by Potter, Rosanne G.

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1988
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 651 KB
• Volume: 22
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0010-4817
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00057648

✦ Synopsis

Currently most literary critics reject the use of science and technology to gain information about texts, while most computer text-analysts have become absorbed in science and technology and forgotten they were seeking information about literature. Whether these two trends will continue into the 1990's remains to be seen; that they explain a good deal about the world we work in now can, I think, be demonstrated. This essay looks at the questions of what literary computing could offer to literary critics, why computer users get lost in scientific jargon, what happens when text becomes input and, most importantly, what happens when text becomes output; it closes with a discussion of why the synthesis will be so difficult.