Comments on: The Author Is Human https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2012/01/10/the-author-is-human/ Culture, Politics, Academia and Other Shiny Objects Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:49:36 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.15 By: Gabriel Hankins https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2012/01/10/the-author-is-human/comment-page-1/#comment-8570 Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:49:36 +0000 https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=1838#comment-8570 See the “Compositionist Manifesto” at New Literary History (41: 2010).

]]> By: Gabriel Hankins https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2012/01/10/the-author-is-human/comment-page-1/#comment-8569 Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:48:11 +0000 https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=1838#comment-8569 Hmmmm: that should be:

]]> By: Gabriel Hankins https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2012/01/10/the-author-is-human/comment-page-1/#comment-8568 Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:47:02 +0000 https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=1838#comment-8568 Some us might want to argue that DH has in the above sense always been “compositionist,” precisely in Bruno Latour’s sense: .

]]> By: Alan Jacobs https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2012/01/10/the-author-is-human/comment-page-1/#comment-8550 Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:04:51 +0000 https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=1838#comment-8550 I don’t think Fish is linking DGH with the postmodern. It’s an old argument of his that thinkers in the humanities, modern and postmodern alike, are always looking for ways to get outside the discursive fray, to govern the practice of criticism “from above.” This is what, in his account, the New Critics’ strategies of close reading were all about, and what the era of High Theory was all about — a kind of method-envy, grounded in a naïve belief that the right theoretical or strategic approach will get you out of the pit of rhetoric, in which the people who win the day are just the ones with the best debating skills, not the ones with Secure Knowledge or Theoretical Authority. So Fish is prone to see DH as yet another in a long series of such attempts to evade the dominance of rhetoric. His argument is always that such attempts are just new forms of rhetoric, and that’s what he thinks about DH as well.

Whether this is an accurate reading depends on which proponent of DH you’re talking about. Most of the people he cites (Fitzpatrick, Sample, etc.) are shrewd enough not to make truly grandiose claims, but I would say that enough DHers are sufficiently utopian, and sufficiently dismissive of alternative approaches, to make Fish’s accurate in some cases.

]]>