In Matthew Jocker's book Macroanalysis: Digital Methods & Literary History, we get an expansion on the premise of the previous book (Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees), specificially in the idea of "mapping out" or charting the ways in which books relate to one another (and differ) due to issues of gender, nationality, and chronology. I found this book frustratingly interesting, if that makes any sense. I am not mathematically inclined, so all the citations of various equations used to arrive at algorithims and what not may have gone over my head or led me to jump ahead to the next paragraph. But I liked the idea of trying to chart books more than just via close reading.
Now seems like a bad time to admit this, but I've never been that good of a close reader (or that close of a close reader, if you prefer). In my years at Tri-County Tech and further onwards, speed was the name of the game; I had to have sections 1-7 of The Odyssey or whatever read by Tuesday, and ready to talk about them in some depth. Oftentimes, speed trumped paying-attention-to, though as a lifelong (it seems like) English major I could bullshit with the best of them. Sometimes I got more from the class discussions than I would've gotten just reading the text alone, without the context of in-class discussion. So while I go to the Church of Close Reading, I often spend more time trying to get to an arbitrarily-chosen page number to round out my day of reading.
That being said, I can see why close reading is essential to literature studies; if you didn't pay attention to Moby-Dick, you might think it was a happy adventure tale (or if you watched the Demi Moore film of The Scarlet Letter, that Indians attacked the Puritan town, and Hester and Dimmesdale were able to flee to safety together). But as my Literary Theory class is good at pointing out, there are many ways to read a text (to even close-read a text); you could be all about the text minus any contextual grounding or even authorial biography (i.e., Formalism/Structuralism/Post-Structuralism) or you could be all about all that (Historicism). Word definitions can change over time (gay means something totally different to an older generation, no matter how many times my friends and I used to snicker about the former Myrtle Beach landmark "The Gay Dolphin"). Works can be neglected in their time, only becoming relevant when a new generation discovers them (think of all the cult films from the Seventies, box-office flops or cheap cash-in genre pieces that are now elevated to the ranks of Citizen Kane in some critics' eyes) or misinterpreted then and even now ("Civil Disobediance" is far more inflammatory when you see it through Thoreau's eyes than through that of Gandhi or MLK).
I found it interesting that Jockers tries to advocate for both close and "distant reading," as he points out that any truly scholarly attempt to document everything from any given time period (like English novels in the 19th century) is ultimately doomed because of the sheer bulk of materials at hand. Also, we can get a distorted view based on our limited resources or perceptions (the discussion of Irish-American literature was fascinating, because in all honesty I never thought that Irish-American literature existed in the West, not in the 19th century). I laughed a little at the word cloud for topics or phrases that came up in English novels from the 1800s (because "hounds and shooting sport" was the largest such phrase to crop up), but there's valuable insights to be gained from such "unconventional" searches. Any attempt at a close reading of primary sources from just about any era would be a daunting task and (as Jockers suggests) impossible to achieve during the course of a normal human lifespan.
I'm drawn more to late-20th century literature as a reader, because on some level I've always wanted a class that could include Salinger and Pynchon as well as the more established leading lights of literature (and I did, while as an undergrad; I had a World Lit class that included Murakami, and a 20th-century lit class that covered everything from Camus to Toni Morrison), so it's disheartening to realize that a lot of the tools used on older, public-domain literature might not be applicable to more recent work because of copyright restrictions. But given enough time, more and more work should be available for downloading and disassembling (perhaps more likely in the lifetime of any hypothetical children I have in the next twenty years or so, but still). For now, we have to make due with Jane Austen (whom I enjoy) and other dead authors who can't sue us for using their work in ways that they couldn't have imagined.
I worked at a public library for about a year (late 2009 to mid-2010), and this was at what seemed like the height of Twilight-mania, as you had the movies starting to appear (in all their moody, under-acted glory) and copycat books appear by authors who may or may not have been "influenced" by Twilight (but who were certainly influenced by the dollar signs that appeared for any book that rode that wave). I'd constantly see patrons (mostly teenage girls) come in and request various variations on the supernatural themes of Twilight ("I'm in love with a boy who, at midnight, turns into a 1973 Ford Pinto" and so forth), and you literally couldn't tell them that these books were garbage (mostly because I didn't read them, and also you weren't supposed to make fun of patrons' reading habits. Tom Clancy still had a huge audience amongst middle-aged white guys who disliked then-brand-new President Obama). When Jockers started to chart some of the works that had those kind of similarities over a number of years, it made me think of all the vampire-esque books we had at that point in time, the seemingly endless variations on the particular theme that cropped up almost overnight. Obviously, books take a long time to come together, but the sheer confluence of Twilight-Lite works made me wonder if this wasn't planned years in advance (granted, the Twilight books must have pre-dated the movies by a certain number of years, though I'm too lazy to look that up on Wikipedia). It's humbling to realize that "literature with a capital L" could often be as trendy as hashtags on Twitter about various celebrities or what not, but also humanizing. For every Stephanie Meyer or Bram Stoker, there are a million what-the-hell-is-their-name(s) out there jumping on the bandwagon. But bandwagons get awful crowded, and people have a tendency to fall off.
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