Alan Liu

The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism

The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism Author(s): Alan Liu Source: ELH, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Winter, 1989), pp. 721-771 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2873158 . Accessed: 13/07/2014 01:51 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to ELH. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Sun, 13 Jul 2014 01:51:25 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse

Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse Author(s): Alan Liu Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Autumn 2004), pp. 49-84 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/427302 Accessed: 13-06-2016 05:25 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Critical Inquiry This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Mon, 13 Jun 2016 05:25:50 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

The state of the digital humanities: A report and a critique

The scholarly field of the digital humanities has recently expanded and integrated its fundamental concepts, historical coverage, relationship to social experience, scale of projects, and range of interpretive approaches. All this brings the overall field (including the related area of new media studies) to a tipping point where it has the potential not just to facilitate the work of the humanities but to represent the state of the humanities at large in its changing relation to higher education in the postindustrial state. Are the digital humanities up to this larger task?

Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail

Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail Author(s): Alan Liu Source: Representations, No. 32 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 75-113 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928796 Accessed: 09-06-2016 04:57 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928796?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Representations This content downloaded from 128.111.121.42 on Thu, 09 Jun 2016 04:57:46 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Wordsworth: The History in "Imagination"

I was, at that very moment, in possession of what had, for many years, been the principal object of my ambition and wishes: indifference, which from the usual infirmity of human nature follows ... complete enjoyment, had taken place of it. The marsh, and the fountains, upon comparison with the rise of many of our rivers, became now a trifling object in my sight. I remembered that magnificent scene in my own native country, where the Tweed, Clyde, and Annan rise in one hill; three rivers, as I now thought, not inferior to the Nile in beauty . .. I had seen the rise of the Rhine and Rhone, and the more magnificent sources of the Saone; I began, in my sorrow, to treat the inquiry about the source of the Nile as a violent effort of a distempered fancy:-

Friending the Past: The Sense of History and Social Computing

Reflecting on the relation between the media ages of orality, writing, and digital networking, Liu asks the question: what happens today to the “sense of history” that was the glory of the high age of print? In particular, what does the age of social computing—social networking, blogs, Twitter, etc.—have in common with prior ages in which the experience of sociality was deeply vested in a shared sense of history? Liu focuses on a comparison of nineteenth-century historicism and contemporary Web 2.0, and concludes by touching on the RoSE Research-oriented Social Environment that the Transliteracies Project he directs has been building to model past bibliographical resources as a social network.

The state of the digital humanities

The scholarly field of the digital humanities has recently expanded and integrated its fundamental concepts, historical coverage, relationship to social experience, scale of projects, and range of interpretive approaches. All this brings the overall field (including the related area of new media studies) to a tipping point where it has the potential not just to facilitate the work of the humanities but to represent the state of the humanities at large in its changing relation to higher education in the postindustrial state. Are the digital humanities up to this larger task?

Is Digital Humanities a Field? ‒ An Answer from the Point of View of Language

This article reflects on the way apparently low-level linguistic variances in the way scholars write about the “digital humanities” point to overarching conceptual issues relating to the “DH” field. Is digital humanities a disciplinary field? Is it unified enough to be one? Should it be? These are some of the questions related to discipline formation and professionalization that digital humanists have recently asked. The unstable mix of grammatical and stylistic usages they employ to discuss their field represents their divergent answers. Currently, their linguistic usage seems to signal a trend toward a unitary sense of field. However, that sense is still being inflected by the larger conversation that the digital humanities field is having with overarching and neighboring fields of humanities scholarship with cognate linguistic usages.

Remembering the Spruce Goose: Historicism, Postmodernism, Romanticism

We enter the great, white dome and gather in the reception theater. Computer-coordinated slide projectors whir to life to tell us in a rapid montage of images and voices the Story. ‘‘A success story, a driving power, a dynamic tycoon, the envy of Wall Street, a world-record-breaking pilot, the toast of the nation: a man who could make things happen,’’ the voices recite. ‘‘Who was this man? Howard Hughes. His mission: to build the world’s largest airplane. . . .’’ The story draws to a close; the screen rises slowly; we walk through the space of the screen to see—alone in its black, reflecting pool—the Plane.

Teaching ‘Literature+’: Digital Humanities Hybrid Courses in the Era of MOOCs

One of the debilitating aspects of recent discussions about the use of digital technologies in higher education—whether these discussions occur in university planning contexts or in the wider theatre of media reports and national policy—is that attention to the quality of learning and teaching comes at the very end of a long train of broader topics. This essay takes the opposite tack and explores what would happen if we start with attending to the quality of the learning and teaching experience in a small-scale hybrid digital humanities course and only then widen the gyre of discussion to the larger national and international contexts where it might make sense to talk of all-digital or mostly-digital MOOCs. Doing so means that we must first consider quality in the non-comparative light of the ‘qualities’—the specific properties and attributes—of the mixed classroom/digital experience. Only with some directly observable sense of the educational qualities afforded by innovative digital technologies—‘micro-disruptions’, they might be called—can we then scale up the discussion to the wider institutional and socioeconomic contexts of online instruction with awareness of the equivalent qualities that will be needed.