Literary Simulation and the Digital Humanities: Reading, Editing, Writing

Description

How can we use digital media to understand reading, editing, and writing as literary processes? How can we design the digital medium in a way that goes beyond the printed codex? This book is an attempt to answer those fundamental questions by bringing together a new theory of literary studies with a highly dynamic digital environment. Using the digital archive of the modernist masterpiece Book of Disquiet, by the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), as case study and site for simulation and practical experiment, Literary Simulation and the Digital Humanities demonstrates how computational approaches to texts can fully engage with the complexities of contemporary literary theory. Manuel Portela marshals a unique combination of theoretical speculation, literary analysis, and human imagination in what amounts to a significant critical intervention and a key advance in the use of digital methods to rethink the processes of reading and writing literature. The foregrounding of the foundational practices of reading, editing, and writing will be relevant for several fields, including literary studies, scholarly editing, software studies, and digital humanities.

Manuel Portela is Professor in the Department of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, where he directs the PhD Programme in Materialities of Literature. He is the author of Scripting Reading Motions: The Codex and the Computer as Self-Reflexive Machines (MIT Press, 2013) and O Comercio da Literatura: Mercado e Representacao [The Commerce of Literature; Marketplace and Representation] (Antigona, 2003). He is the general editor of LdoD Archive: Collaborative Digital Archive of the Book of Disquiet (https://ldod.uc.pt, 2017).

Dear reader, if you are a believer in the almighty virtues of the representational power of editions, if you are a true disciplinarian in textual matters, if you hold that knowledge validation in the digital humanities depends exclusively on quantitative criteria, Literary Simulation and the Digital Humanities is not for you. Or is it? * Joao Dionisio, Associate Professor, School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, Portugal *