“We find ourselves these days at a strange point in the history of intellection, where the “how” of finding out often looms larger as a form of innovation than the “what.””
“this is the meta language of his book, begging the question of what it means to find ourselves here rather than there, to recover what floats accidentally to the surface rather than to look for patterns in the past”
“Silver, whose career involves looking at objects, uses his literary training to work by example. He takes something that is both fascinating in itself (a certain inky dot on a certain preserved page) and shows how this object can expand under scrutiny (the magnified dot becomes, in the mind of Hooke, but also under Silver’s curatorship, a point of digression, a whole world within a world). The joy of a good close-reader zooming in on meaning, even when texts themselves are aren’t in focus as discourse, is evident.”
“It is Silver’s gift to show how words, concepts, figures might all flow from and back to this — this gallstone, this pebble, this blank page, this inky dot. He insists firmly that there really is and must in renewed terms be a “this.” His writing about objects does not mean writing about the representation of objects. A project looking at 18th-century coins is different from one looking at the description of 18th-century coins. Silver vitalizes this distinction. But those with an eye for the real stuff are not let off the literary hook. If those objects are to lead back into the realm of words and concepts, Silver suggests, literary scholars need to be there to interpret them.”
“Pasanek’s ability to handle the results of his electronic searches also evidences a new form of literary scholarship. His searches are unfriendly to real objects. Although there’s a lot of thoughtful glossing of the industries and processes associated with, for instance, metals and paper in his book, there are no real objects here. Big data searches — the new darlings of the empirically minded — work here in tandem with the proposition that everything is language. If everything is language, then all the searching in the world can still only produce language. Pasanek gives the impression of being able to do the technical stuff in his sleep, but this is because for him the real work of making sense of a quantitively large data set still remains interpretative. When large spikes in the use of mirror metaphors don’t correspond to a change in mirror technologies, we’re going to need to explain that spike in terms of processes internal to discourse after all.”
“Of course, to emphasize the different kinds of timeliness at work in these two studies is not to slight what they have in common. They are erudite, beautifully written, and long-prepared, and both set high standards of legibility for literary history. Whether they draw on objects or computation, strong scholarly projects, these books suggest in tandem, are still likely to be good to read.”
“Together, Pasanek and Silver bring to an end a scholarly era when it was possible to blame the Enlightenment for the desire to screen out the messiness of the material world from the activity of thought.”
“And they help inaugurate one of it being necessary for current scholars to put their own methods on show, right in the center of whatever else they have to say.”