The quote that has struck me most from this week’s readings is from Lynn Coady’s Who Reads Books?: Reading in the Digital Age: “The problem with this conversation we’ve been having over the past couple of decades is that it perpetually confuses capitalism with technology and technology with culture itself. Technology exists apart from, but is profoundly influenced by capitalism, and the same can be said of culture” (p. 35).

I’m not sure she goes far enough in her arguments about this distinction, but I’m at least glad to know she’s aware of them. For example, Jessica Pressman uses Mark Z. Danielewski’s series The Familiar, which was meant to be 27 volumes, as an example of the future of the novel in the digital age. But would publishing companies have gone along with this if someone less famous had pitched the original idea? Even with his fame, the series was ended after only 5 volumes were published because of low readership (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Z._Danielewski#The_Familiar).

How many great books have been written and we’ll never get to read them because they never make it off the slush pile based on the preferences of a small group of people and/or marketing concerns over what sells? The publishing industry as we know it is built on the exploitation of rank and file workers who want to work in publishing because they love books so much (see Coady, pp. 36-37; and, e.g., https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/29/the-book-industry-isnt-dead-thats-just-an-excuse-to-keep-salaries-low), so it probably needs to go or massively change how it operates.

Will Self’s arguments about the loss of the “serious[ness]” and “cultural primacy” of novels (Coady, pp. 13, 17) reminded me of multimillionaire James Patterson complaining about how hard it is for older white men to get published (see: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/books/james-patterson-discrimination-white-men.amp.html; I find myself wondering whether Self would agree with Patterson or disassociate himself because Patterson’s writing isn’t “serious” enough). Similarly, Jonathan Franzen’s argument about modernity ruining books (Coady, pp. 32-33) is also annoying. Neither Franzen nor Self seem to question who gets to define so-called serious literature and who gets to enjoy it, as if the literary cannon hasn’t been carefully curated by and for a very small number of privileged people over the years. And by harkening back to it, it feels like they’re actually limiting what the future of the novel can be.

I very much admire Coady’s and Pressman’s optimism about the future of the novel. Technology has its limitations, and when we borrow technological tools built by private industry for expressly capitalist purposes—which isn’t uncommon in DH—we have to be careful about how we use them and acknowledge any shortcomings therein. I’m very curious to check out the digital game/novel hybrid experience Pry that Pressman discusses in their article. I love how each of their examples speak to different aspects of what people love about books: getting absorbed/lost in words (The Familiar), the physicality of books (The House of Paper), and the experience of being part of/creating a story (Pry). Pressman’s examples certainly speak to Coady’s Twitter poll participants sharing what aspects of books they love (p. 40).

And this cautious optimism has me thinking about what’s possible for our projects in this class. How can we contribute and save the novel (if it indeed even needs saving) and/or challenge what a novel can be?

Though I had a hard time overall digesting Alan Liu’s “From Reading to Social Computing” article, I did find parts of it inspirational. For instance, in paragraph 18, where he quotes D. F. McKenzie: “…each reading is peculiar to its occasion…”. I think it speaks to people rereading books and rewatching shows and movies, and it also reminded me of Choose Your Own Adventure books where this is even more literal. Could we capture this experience somehow in a tool or platform? Maybe if you have a story you love to reread regularly and annotate your experience of it each time, and you have a history of yourself reading the book. Maybe this could be achieved with Hypothesis if the copy exists digitally, though I’m not aware of a way to filter annotations with this tool, and it would be interesting to see your annotations together and also separately based on date or some other organizing feature.

I was also intrigued by Liu’s example of sailors having their own presses on long voyages (paragraph 21)—I had no idea this was a thing. Could we use an existing digital database of text and somehow recreate this experience? Or let people import their own text—a la the desert island question game where you decide what things are most important to you.

Similarly, I was struck by this note from Leah Price about historical reading practices: “Instead of respecting the anthology’s boundaries, poetry lovers scissored pages apart to past scraps of one collection into the margins of another.” Could we recreate this experience digitally? Perhaps using an existing text archive like the English Broadside Ballad Archive, Poetry Foundation, or Academy of American Poets as the base from which people can choose text to curate for themselves.