Interactive Cosmopolitanism and Collaborative Technologies: New Foundations for Global Literary History Amy J. Elias New Literary History, Volume 39, Number 3, Summer 2008, pp. 705-725 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/nlh.0.0036 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nlh/summary/v039/39.3.elias.html Access Provided by University of Tennessee @ Knoxville at 09/05/10 9:56PM GMT Interactive Cosmopolitanism and Collaborative Technologies: New Foundations for Global Literary History Amy J. Elias Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me. It occurs to me that I am America. —Allen Ginsberg, “America”1 A llen ginsberg’s “america” (1956) playfully reminds us of the importance of rhetorical mode. Self-reflection and political critique merge in the poem as the speaker manages simultaneously to assert his opposition to and his complicity with the dominant world power of his day. This power happens to be his home country and the discursive regime that—he is dismayed to realize—has formed his habits of mind in the midst of cultural racism, the Red Scare, and metastasizing pop-culture consumerism. Yet conversing with a personified America, the speaker repeatedly asserts solidarity with ordinary working people across racial and ethnic boundaries, and the poem is at least partly about remembering what the abstraction of the political has obscured: “I am America.” For all his anger, horror, and sadness at U.S. internal and foreign politics, he finally asserts solidarity with the people and, ironically adopting an American “can-do” work ethic, vows to put “my queer shoulder to the wheel” in order to help get the country back on the right socialist path. Irony, self-reflexivity, and dialogic form enable Ginsberg to invert valences of what constitutes “the serious” in both culture and discourse; reflexively critique the notion of “proper” poetics; and reaffirm and potentially reconstruct an organic political identification with the very people often most scorned by purveyors of abstraction and global power. Ginsberg’s poem came to mind as I reread the past few decades’ academic conversation about literary history, which is strikingly serious in tone, analysis, and prognostication, and also decidedly monologic and top-down in its quest for the proper subject of inquiry. Considering whether a global literary history is possible, I would like to consider an New Literary History, 2008, 39: 705–725 706 new literary history alternative approach, one that moves in Ginsberg’s direction, perhaps to reveal in the current discussion about literary history “a positive unconscious of knowledge: a level that eludes the consciousness of the scientist and yet is part of scientific discourse, instead of disputing its validity and seeking to diminish its scientific nature.”2 I would like to consider how new technologies might enable a dialogic, interactive global literary history, understanding that, inevitably, this option will seem to stand outside a rubric of seriousness constructed by rationalized disciplinarity and professional culture. The Medium Is the Message Current discussions of alternatives to national literary history parallel history’s move from political to social history some time ago. Taking cues from current debates about national literary histories versus literary histories categorized by race, class, or gender, those considering the question “is global literary history possible?” immediately confront a number of options. A global literary history could take the global itself as the topic of historical investigation. What literary forms were associated with the initial stages of globalization, with what changes in literary forms were these mutations associated, and what today comprise residual and emergent forms of globalization and its literature(s)? A very different tack would be taken if “global literary history” were understood to be the equivalent of “the history of world literature,” which would send discussion in the direction of comparative literature studies.3 A related but differently inflected course of study that investigated not the history of the global but the global characteristics of the literary might seek some literary category that seemed, if not universal, then at least massively cross-cultural and multinational, as in Michael Denning’s presentation of proletarian literature, or Thomas Pavel’s, Margaret Cohen’s, or Hans Gumbrecht’s discussions of themes and chronotopes (such as love, the seascape, or the road) as unifying generic touchstones in the international novel.4 A fourth course might be one more familiar to literary historians: a debate about the history of literary history, concerning the origins and development of literary history itself and addressing how definitions of history have changed and will change in a global field.5 Yet while all of these approaches can be effective at challenging existing subjects of study, they all tend to resist certain kinds of metacritical analysis. That is, while the orientations and subjects of literary history (national versus global versus local, gendered, raced, language-origin based, and so forth) provoke heated and very important debate, there is almost no discussion about the form of literary history, the way that interactive cosmopolitanism 707 literary history is actually written or transmitted. For the most part, no matter how radical the change in canon advocated by a piece of literary historical scholarship, the advocacy as well as its target will be an urbane piece of scholarly criticism written by an expert in the field(s); like the present essay, it will be predicated upon existing protocols of academic writing (review of existing scholarly literature, certain parameters of tone and voice, situation within disciplinary vocabulary, acknowledgment of sources in disciplinary format) and an assumption of original contribution subject to review by established disciplinary processes. The work of literary history remains the work of experts with deep and sometimes unacknowledged allegiances to academic hierarchies, print culture, filled intellectual spaces, continuities, and diachronic evolution. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But such an approach does leave in place precisely the desires (for closure, completeness, and writerly authority) implicit in—and points of potential slippage, silence, erasure, or oversight instantiated by—that form. It tends to underplay the importance of poetics as the subject of literary history as well as the foundation of literary history, history’s enunciatory mode. And it runs right by the question of whether the form of historical narrative itself matters if we are going to discuss a global literary history. Questions about form, particularly the closed form seemingly desired by historical investigation, have been central to the past twenty years of historiography. As Paul Ricoeur asks throughout his career, what does it mean to say that something really happened or that we remember it happening, and in answering these questions, how is the referential mode of history different from that of memory and any natural or social science? Ricoeur answers this with recourse to the notion of trace: the trace “stands for” the past, takes its place, and thus constructs historical knowledge as indirect knowledge. Historical knowledge thus bears a unique relation to representation; writing history is always representing history and includes the enigma of this historical reference. Historians, even perhaps literary historians, don’t like to acknowledge this: “For the historian, the ontological question implicitly contained in the notion of trace is immediately covered over by the epistemological question of the document, namely, its value as warrant, support, proof in the explanation of the past.”6 Between a negative understanding of history as Kantian limiting concept and a historian’s recourse to history as positive limiting concept (the historian’s “inexhaustible debt” to the past that causes her to return again and again to “touch up the painting” of history), there is a gap, history, that we conceptualize and pursue. History as narrative conception thus cannot exist without an injection of the virtual, which—as Hayden White and Fredric Jameson have taught us in different ways—is tamed by modal shaping and emplotment, which are closely related to, and entangled with, form. 708 new literary history Historiography has been mildly obsessed with deconstructing the closed form of history for at least forty years now, as evidenced in writing by numerous historiographers and in essays appearing in History and Theory, Rethinking History, and other journals devoted to the field.7 Poststructuralism and “the linguistic turn” in critical theory vastly reconfigured this question concerning the closure and objectivity of the empirical and worked hard to contaminate the perceived boundaries between fiction and history, point out the aporias of objectivity, and posit the historical field sous rature.8 And as many writers have observed since, undermining our faith in history still further have been postcolonialism, multiculturalism, identity politics, and critical race and gender theories that point to the ideological, motivated, and mediated nature of any historical reconstruction. In the face of all these attacks, what is striking about current discussions of literary history is the assumption that it can be narrated and, beyond that, the desire that its narrativization should take the form of ethnographic history or even longue durée. It is possible that poststructuralism, the “linguistic turn,” and deconstructive historiography have proven to be interesting thought experiments having little or no impact on how history continues to be practiced and written. Nancy F. Partner has nicely summarized this state of affairs: [F]rom my own non-scientific but not atypical sampling of conference papers, journal articles and university press books, it is my impression that the “linguistic turn” was a revolving door that everyone went around and around and got out exactly where they got in. For all the sophistication of the theory-saturated part of the profession, scholars in all the relevant disciplines that contribute to or depend on historical information carry on in all essential ways as though nothing had changed since Ranke, or Gibbon for that matter: as though invisible guardian angels of epistemology would always spread protective wings over facts, past reality, true accounts, and authentic versions, as though the highly defensible, if not quite the definitive, version would always be available when we really needed it.9 For Partner, this is not a bad thing; as she rightly points out, the linguistic turn in history tended to pose false problems and overstate its case. Few historians practice history by trying to create a wholly objective, empirically reasoned historical account; narrativization has always been part of the historian’s self-consciously constructed toolbox; and the great theorists of historical emplotment are, in fact, very far from wholesale endorsement of historical deconstruction and ungrounding. My point is that between the poles of linguistic aporia and rigid disciplinary protocols, there is probably room for further reconsideration of the forms of historical writing, for as debates within both camps become interactive cosmopolitanism 709 institutionalized, they increasingly tend to address the content of literary history—its scale, its epistemological and political assumptions, and its hermeneutics—more than, to use White’s phrasing, the content of the actual form. Thus reconsidering the form of literary history in a global era can be a much more modest endeavor than it sounds, for it is really not a repudiation of history’s ends but a reconsideration of its means. And yet . . . Jerome McGann, as advocate of bibliographical history, has asked the questions that haunt me here: “Must we regard the physical channels of communications as part of the message of the texts we study? Or are the channels to be treated as purely vehicular forms whose ideal condition is to be transparent to the texts they deliver? How important, for the reader of a novel or any other text, are the work’s various materials, means, and modes of production?”10 We should not be surprised that, for literary history as for any other textual artifact, form has function and, as Jonathan Arac has argued, “organization has consequences.”11 One of the most remarked-upon of recent literary histories has been A New History of French Literature (1989), which drew attention not only for the historical contexts it narrated and for the new necessary relation it posited between texts and contexts, but also for its method of telling history.12 The volume is cited so often in articles about literary history at least partly because of its rarity as a metahistorical document. Reconsidering the role of, and options for, form in the writing of literary history introduces a number of considerations to the global history project. First, considering poetics and rhetoric might increase inclusiveness. Cultures exist, for example, that do not define either literature or criticism as the product of individual inspiration or print culture’s single-authored writerly endeavor. Oral literatures, and some written literatures with call-and-response forms, come to mind (others that we can’t conceptualize, precisely because we define art the way we do, don’t). Assuming that a “global literary history” will be more inclusive of cultural difference, how would such a literature be included and transcribed within that history in a way that didn’t reposition it within, and reduce it to, a completely different set of aesthetic values forming the mode of transcription/analysis itself?13 In addition, reconsidering aesthetic form might make it possible to imagine other ways of telling literary history that take into account the insights of structuralist and poststructuralist formalisms instead of brushing them off as irrelevant or insidious rhetorical games. In a recent issue of Profession, Jane Gallop writes a defense of New Criticism as “a great leveler of cultural capital” and notes that it “is thus ironic that, in a moment of antielitism, we tended to jettison close reading in favor of historicism” that “returns us to an older, more authoritarian model of transmitting preprocessed knowledge.”14 As startling as it is to see 710 new literary history the self-proclaimed Bad Girl of psychoanalytic feminism hunker down in trenches dug by William Empson, Cleanth Brooks, and John Crowe Ransom, the point is well-taken and applies to the writing of literary history as well. Claudia Stokes has gone further, claiming that literary history always arises in a political climate in which literature studies must justify its practicality to nation-building: “Literary history seems to emerge and reemerge in the company of a host of other expressions of anxious nationalism, such as heated debates about family structures and maternity . . . and renewed interest in racial classification as a way of taking stock of a national population believed to be in jeopardy from menaces abroad.”15 She clearly sees today’s academy’s renewed interest in literary history in this context.16 Surely it can be said that today, committed to cultural inclusion and antielitism, many of us nonetheless practice a way of writing history that is, in fact, built upon an authoritarian Western model of transmitting knowledge and that often fails to turn formalist reading loose on history writing. We need either to defend the model that we practice or consider alternatives to it. And finally (and I know what you’re going to say), reconsidering the role of aesthetic form in literary history might bring back some of the Ginsbergian pleasure of the game. Some of the current theory about what literary history is or should be sounds downright grim; sometimes acting as prim reapers of literary history, we speak not with a forked tongue but with pursed lips, reasserting the Platonic values of republican art. Literature becomes a primer of ethics and social values, something that is good for us, a medicinal draft. In the academy’s sometimes neo-Victorian zeal to construct a high-fiber canon, the frothy virtuality of aesthetic style or form seems like trans fat we should skim for our own good. One might see this high seriousness as a deferred love of the aesthetic possibilities inherent in writing, at a moment when the value of formal poetics is undercut by a hegemonic historicism in critical studies. Yet would it be so bad to imagine a form for global history that strives for a virtuality that smirks just a bit at the hammer-fist of academic seriousness? And more importantly, might not the high seriousness currently demanded of literary history blind us to the aristocratic coterie we form to protect decorum—and to how decorum and seriousness are linked to form in ways that protect disciplinary history from encroachment by amateurs, the unapprenticed, the lumpen professoriat? In point of fact, the question of who writes world literature and history is a central concern of virtually all late twentieth-century literary theory, and it is the core problem complicating the creation of a global literary history. Advocating an aesthetics of reception as the antidote to objectivizing literary history, Hans Robert Jauss turns to music as analogy: “A literary work is . . . not a monument which reveals its timeless essence in a interactive cosmopolitanism 711 monologue. It is much more like an orchestration which strikes ever new chords among its readers and which frees the text from the substance of the words and makes it meaningful for the time. . . . A literary work must be understood as creating a dialogue, and philological scholarship has to be founded on a continuous re-reading of texts, not on mere facts.”17 But who is doing this rereading? This was the question of Edward Said, who in Culture and Imperialism advocated a “contrapuntal” approach to history that simultaneously took into account metropolitan history and its others. As it did for Jauss, the metaphor of contrapuntal music allowed Said to posit a historical form that was accretive and in which no one voice dominates. Contrapuntal literary history stood in contrast to a world comparative literature that constructed “the extraordinary privilege of an observer located in the West who could actually survey the world’s literary output with a kind of sovereign detachment.”18 The turn to musical analogies underscores the importance of Bakhtinian dialogue, heteroglossia, and polyphony (itself a musical metaphor) to revisions of global literary history. Advocating a “view from the cultural seam” and positing a syndetic, nonassimilative space of enunciation in many ways similar to Said’s, Homi Bhabha asserts that the “enunciative right” is “the dialogical right to address and be addressed, to signify and be interpreted, to speak and be heard, to make a sign and to know that it will receive respectful attention.”19 Referencing Hannah Arendt’s notion that “the right to narrate is not simply a linguistic act; it is also a metaphor for the fundamental human interest in freedom itself” (199–200), he asserts this human enunciative right that, extended to the level of literary internationalism—a global literature or literary history—would be understood as a state of ongoing cultural translation (203). Rey Chow sets the discussion in relation to comparative literature studies, rejecting the idea of “comparison” based in taxonomic models (which rarely assume actual parity between sides in conflict or comparison and often embed their own hierarchies that deemphasize the particular and the local) and seeking a space somewhere between the universal and the national. Linda Hutcheon notes that any comparative approach to literary history would be described by “the Bakhtinian term dialogic—with all the . . . associations of hybridity, flexibility, a willingness to engage conflicts at issue without seeking resolution, a resistance to closure, a distrust of single responses, and a keen sense of the ‘otherness’ of a past that is nonetheless not alien.”20 My questions are seemingly simple ones: When we discuss the possibility of global literary history, should we easily assume that our written critical essays enable dialogism in the manner of music or the novel (as Bakhtin understood it)? Will simply multiplying the number of ethnocultural monographs and essays on our library shelves ensure enunciative 712 new literary history rights and diversity, or will a contrapuntal literary history on a global scale require a new dialogic form? If so, what would be an effective dialogical vehicle for a literary history that retains or recuperates the civic and political force of historical knowledge yet ruptures the (Western) decorum of the old histories as well as the most arbitrary of its therapeutic assumptions of ethnocentric value and classed disciplinarity? (Is that a dehistoricizing question? Is there a form that is effective only for our own historical moment?) Can we find a humanistic, contrapuntal, dialogic formal compromise between top-down and chaos when we build a global literary history? Wikis and Tag Clouds and Games, Oh My It is my semiserious suggestion that the world of cyberspace may offer us some options. Wolfgang Iser noted some time ago that “The convergence of text and reader . . . must always remain virtual, as it is not to be identified either with the reality of the text or with the individual disposition of the reader. It is the virtuality of the work that gives rise to its dynamic nature. . . . [The reader] sets the work in motion.”21 With this move, Iser recuperated the rhetorical and ethical origins of Bakhtin’s dialogism, setting it not within the confines of a written text but in the world of readers, the world of lived experience. Dialogism between text and reader and movement itself constitute the virtual reality created by reading. In writing that this convergence between text and reader creates a virtual space somehow beyond both, a space emerging from interactivity, Iser situates the “virtuality” of the text in the space of dialogic movement itself, in the space of interaction rather than the space of identity. Flow, movement, and virtual space, of course, characterize the interactive environments enabled by digital technologies such as the World Wide Web. “On the Internet,” writes Mark Poster, “individuals construct their identities in relation to ongoing dialogues, not as acts of pure consciousness.”22 In other words, the Internet is more like a social space than a thing; its effects are more like those of Germany than those of hammers. The effect of Germany upon the people within it is to make them Germans (at least for the most part); the effect of hammers is not to make people hammers . . . but to force metal spikes into wood. As long as we understand the Internet as a hammer we will fail to discern the way it is like Germany. (262) Supporting the idea that online subjectivity will be shaped by (as much as shape) the new space of BWO (Bodies Without Organs)that constitutes interactive cosmopolitanism 713 Web 2.0, this perspective leads Poster and others to examine the nature of the virtual public sphere, the space created by the dialogic interactions of its virtual residents. But it is important to note the possible reification of the national space in the metaphor above, one that Poster himself would contest in his claim that the Internet “is a technology that puts cultural acts, symbolizations in all forms, in the hands of all participants; it radically decentralizes the positions of speech, publishing, film-making, radio and television broadcasting, in short the apparatuses of cultural production” (267). That decentralization is evidenced in the numerous attempts to create online literary archives, and these often implied a larger project: if the number of linked documents reached a certain scale, the site might constitute a rhizomatically organized literary history of one kind or another. Some of these early HTML sites were quite wonderful and continue to provide students and scholars access to important research materials. What characterized these projects was their attempt at opening access to newly created or existing library archives via Internet connections, often through a university host or provider. While archive sites tended to be closed, with user access only to catalogued materials controlled by the site operators, some of the early sites also attempted to construct a more interactive environment with site policies that encouraged open submissions of content to the Web site administrator. Yet today, user Internet access to static, archived HTML or JPEG documents has morphed into dynamic communication between user and interface, where users access sources and sites that are not simple HTML documents. At a time when thousands of people daily participate in social network sites (SNS) such as Flickr, Blogger, Facebook, BlackPlanet, GeoCities, MySpace, and YouTube, the Web has become almost naturalized as a social space. It has also become increasingly differentiated and user controlled. People have already become Germany and are looking at the Internet again like a hammer. Or perhaps, we are learning how to take our hammers with us into these social spaces, though attitudes toward the worlds of interactive virtuality run the gamut between euphoric praise and condemnatory jeremiad.23 Rather than merely the enclave of programmers or hackers (though these are privileged netizens and may yet control this space in the end), the Web is, in fact, evolving spaces filled with content produced by intelligent and socially engaged amateurs and experts in numerous fields. I would like to suggest that this has implications for new forms of literary history, forms that are inherently more dialogic, interactive, nonlinear, and playful than the ones we have now. SNS are the topic of research in literacy studies, cultural studies, and the new social geographies of communication technologies. Danah Boyd 714 new literary history and Nicole Ellison define a social network site as “web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the systems. The nature and nomenclature of these connections may vary from site to site.”24 Based in empirical research, new studies of these sites illustrate the range of impact they may have on global cultures. For example, Hugo Liu has produced “taste maps” of MySpace users’ interests and tastes as evidenced by what appears on their preferences lists, while Judith Donath’s work is part of a new wave of research analyzing social behavior, the management of trust and identity, within SNS. Dara Byrne has done content analysis on BlackPlanet forums to try to measure civic action opportunities offered by this medium; Leela Damodaran and Wendy Olphert have argued that digital communities offer new possibilities for citizen engagement; Linda Leung contends that, perhaps contrary to our expectations that the Web is the enclave of middle-class white male Westerners, there is, in fact, a significant ethnic minority presence in cyberspace.25 The success of Colby Buzzell’s blog—a blog written by a soldier serving active duty in Iraq, and subsequently taken offline by the U.S. military and later made by Buzzell into a nonfiction book, titled My War: Killing Time in Iraq—attests to new ethical and political impacts of global technologies spawning new reader interactivity.26 YouTube, the online public video-sharing site, is increasingly illustrating how the Web is both Germany and a hammer, with different software applications and components (video software, blogs, links) allowing direct access to the public in an interactive format. Launched in 2005 and purchased by Google in 2006, YouTube now supports local sites in Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom, and quantitative research on it is starting to appear, though its cultural impact has been apparent for some time. Like SNS, then, YouTube has built global access into its very platform. While, as Tizianna Terranova notes, the fluid and global space of virtuality does not guarantee any outcome for political engagement, virtual social movements do “demand different conceptual perspectives from those established within the old infrastructure/superstructure dialectics, the simulation/spectacle Platonic approach, or even the new political effort, to move beyond what Bergson called ‘the logic of solids’ that dominated cultural and social theory within disciplinary societies.”27 This call to examine more fully the impact or potentially positive effect of cyberspace technologies on our routines of knowledge production has direct implications for the creation of a global literary history. Models such as SNS give examples of amateur readers collaborating to construct interactive cosmopolitanism 715 a virtual community of users that use information in new ways and allow for a broad range of inclusiveness. The question is whether expert readers and knowledge workers could collaborate in similar ways, to produce not random aggregations of items defined only by the platform in which they appear, but collections of information defined by scholarly topic of investigation, such as literary genre, national literature, or culturally coded literary mode (for example, queer literature). Wikis offer another model of interactive collaboration similar to SNS. Boon to library-phobic undergraduates and bane of humanities teachers everywhere, Wikipedia is the best public example of wiki structure. The first version of Wikipedia, Nupedia, asked for submissions from professional scholars and had a system of peer review, and went belly-up relatively quickly. Because the top-down approach didn’t work, nonhierarchical dialogism is now a paradigm for Wikipedia from the moment an article appears in its archives. As noted at the site, “Users should be aware that not all articles are of encyclopedic quality from the start, and may contain false or debatable information. Indeed, many articles start their lives as partisan, and it is after a long process of discussion, debate and argument, that they gradually take on a neutral point of view reached through consensus. Others may for a while become caught up in a heavily unbalanced viewpoint which can take some time—months perhaps—to extricate themselves and regain a better balanced consensus.”28 The dialogism is hermeneutical and ethical, based on long-term interaction between real human beings through a virtual space.29 But Wikipedia’s statement is only partially accurate. Empirical studies are now appearing that indicate that, in fact, much of Wikipedia’s content is the work of self-appointed “experts.”30 Since the English version of Wikipedia went online in 2001, numerous other language Wikipedias have been launched, and apparently this inequality of contribution extends to all language versions, with “with approximately 90% of the users authoring less than 10% of the contributions.”31 In terms of information reliability, there seems to be an initial period of unstable behavior lasting up to twenty months and a relatively stable phase that follows, but stability factors are influenced by cultural and social factors of the different language-edition contributors. Of course there are problems of false information, most notably malicious damage to wiki entries,32 but some studies indicate a relatively comparable reliability rate between Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. All of this seems to indicate that the form may be more amenable to scholarly oversight and adaptable to the expert model (defined within professorial culture) than has been previously supposed, but in a manner different from professional hierarchies of expertise.33 One can, for instance, at least imagine a format for an online global literary history that allows scholars to collaborate 716 new literary history and continually revise entries, link to visual materials to clarify historical information, and allow user-collaborators to construct cross-cultural, historical, or generic links that would not occur to a single author or editorial team. A wiki “article” about the history of the novel could be comprised of an infinite number of pages and be constantly updated and revised by scholars from around the world. The new generation of Web 2.0 users understands its relation to Web space as interactive in this way and assumes that Web space is dialogic through SNS and other dynamic network systems. Even in small ways, social software provides new possibilities for collaboration between amateurs and experts across national and disciplinary borders. There is, for example, some interesting work emerging on tag clouds (groups of links, which we might normally see in a list format running down the side of a Web page, but which in tag cloud format are often alphabetically arranged but also differentiated by typeface and arranged in a group or bundle). Algorithmically determined, tag cloud animations are popular despite being less effective than alphabetical lists of links, because they can be created by users rather than just by site operators and, in addition to linking one Web page to another, they “humanize” the site in numerous ways. This is the base logic for the popular site del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site that allows users to post their favorite Web pages labeled with their own tags. The result is something like a New York Times bestseller list, but for every category of Web page imaginable. The tags form constantly fluctuating tag clouds that indicate to all site users which Web pages are popular, but the tags also imply information about the user base. Some tag clouds are oddly beautiful and bridge the gap between linguistic communication and visual art; in fact, clouds featured on Wordle (http://wordle.net) are created as word art. (See Fig. 1.) The content but also the form of the tags gives information, such as that some topics are more popular than others, or that some sites are visited more often. Some researchers now maintain that this kind of tagging challenges hierarchical and ontological categorization in fundamental ways. The potential importance of something as minor as tag clouds for literary history is that they fall under the heading of “folksonomy,” a form of collaborative tagging and social indexing that became popular around 2004 and that has a different logic than does taxonomy.34 Folksonomies are Internet-based and involve social tagging, or subject indexing and data tagging by users in new ways that subvert the top-down approach to tagging and metadata provided by search engines. While folksonomies are flexible, have been praised for their democratic approach to indexing, and have been shown to allow users to construct their own user-based site vocabulary (thereby also constructing a vocabulary for interactive cosmopolitanism 717 Fig. 1. Illustration of a tag cloud from Wordle. http://wordle.net/gallery/wral/268913/ poetry. their communities), they do tend to be less efficient than search-index taxonomies. One compromise—and I have to admit a fondness for the term—is a “collabulary,” which is generated in the manner of a folksonomy but is a collaborative effort between experts and nonexpert users to create search tags that are both efficient and colloquial. Because a “collabulary” incorporates expert and amateur user interfaces, it has the potential to democratize a user space and to extend its dialogic or heteroglossic range. Again, what we see here, in something as small as the collabulary environment of tag clouds, is a way in which networked information might allow for more open categorization without completely abandoning the notion of disciplinary expertise. The collabulary is an interesting wedding of expert scholarly knowledge with more open, less linear form and control: individuals constructing not the platform but the naming, framing, indexing, and cross-referencing of information apart from a site operator’s, or strict editorial, control. Reading Time Magazine in the Basement of the Berkeley Public Library What are the implications of all this for literature? How would any of this translate to the construction of a new global literary history? The question is really whether interactive Web technologies facilitate a new 718 new literary history kind of literary history based more on folksonomies than taxonomies—a literary history that operates in collabulary domains that disrupt institutional hierarchies and disciplinary blindspots, encouraging creativity through formal experimentation, offering opportunities for constant updating and revision, and extending authorship to experts without consideration of national borders or limitation to national histories. After advocating various versions of dialogue and collaboration throughout this essay, I might be excused for not solving the whole structural puzzle now, by myself. However, some possibilities for investigation do come to mind. One focus of investigation might determine what would happen if the wisdom of crowds were combined with a community of experts in an interactive online format. Recent scholarly discussions of what needs to be considered when building a global literary history, in fact, sound surprisingly like James Surowiecki’s elements of a “wise crowd”: diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and aggregation.35 These might be enacted by a gated wiki (one in which only members could join and participate) specifically devoted to the creation of a global literary history, supported by numerous research universities across the world, and unlimited in size. The wiki might feature threads (specific categories of information that could be broken down into conceivably infinite subcategories and could be cross-referenced with the other threads) and tags could be generated by expert users to allow for broader and more creative cross-referencing. The threads could be the names of national literatures, cross-cultural genres, or literary techniques, but they could also be categories corresponding to types of literary historical method.36 For example, in a very different context, Mario J. Valdés sets out a new model for writing literary history based on locating “nodes” of events, including temporal nodes, topographical nodes, institutional nodes, and figurative nodes, corresponding roughly to older notions of periodization, national or other borders, formalist categories, and generic categories. These terms are easily adapted to an interactive, online format as thread or domain separations that might be crossed and crisscrossed by social bookmarking or collaborative tagging. This collaborative method of organization is suggested by another model of categories, Valdés’s summary of Ralph Cohen’s list of different ways a literary text might be understood as a linguistic and cultural historical event: (1) a contemporary description of the context of composition and of reception; (2) a historical reconstruction of the literary work’s context of composition and its reception based on documents contemporary to the literary work; (3) the critical reception of the literary work based on the ideas and aesthetic principles subsequent to the composition; (4) the critical reception of the work through subsequent interpretive interactive cosmopolitanism 719 paradigms that challenge ideological and cultural assumptions about the work’s social context; (5) the critical reception of a work in translation within a linguistic and cultural community different from that of its origin.37 If these “nodes” or categories were made into discussion threads or domains in a wiki-based format, the resulting literary history would mimic the paradigm of a semantic web, organized by conceptual categories but allowing for a wide range of user interactions. In that context, a study such as Wai Chee Dimock’s, which creatively reassigns a primary and global role to epic, might translate into tagging “epic” in entirely new ways and make startling new linkages to existing texts, genres, and periods. Her work on epic might appear in article or encyclopedic form along with tags of her own, but also of her readers’, devising, linking her argument to citations and articles about other genres, other periods. Dimock’s own argument in favor of genre as an organizing global category for world literature would have a home in such a database, one, ironically, that seems to be described in her own argument: “What would literary history look like if the field were divided, not into discrete periods, and not into discrete bodies of national literatures? What other organizing principles might come into play? And how would they affect the mapping of ‘literature’ as an analytic object: the length and width of the field; its lines of filiation, lines of differentiation; the database needed in order to show significant continuity or significant transformation; and the bounds of knowledge delineated, the arguments emerging as a result?”38 In a nonhierarchically ordered database, the different filiations of literature across historical, national, and linguistic borders might grow rhizomatically, the emerging emphases of its tag clouds perhaps surprising even critics with unexpected statements of popularity or significance. What such a format admittedly might lack, however, might be stories of development. The challenge of a literary history in database or wiki format would be to negotiate contiguity (or diachronic progression) and connection (or synchronic simultaneity)—the presentation of coherent discussion threads lengthy enough to construct a developmental historical narrative of one sort or another along with the dialogic linking of such narratives to other narratives or elements in other threads. To generate an interactive database for a literary history, we would need to collaborate with data technologists and Web designers to generate our platform and with other experts in language-arts fields across the world to generate content. But with open tagging of information, in which all expert users could enter information and link any lexia at will to any other (in a collabulary environment), it might be possible to create entirely new intersections between different national literatures, different conceptions of “the literary,” different applications of literary- 720 new literary history critical terminology. Users of the database would have the freedom to create tags and may be inspired to link information in new ways, across semantic and political ravines that now divide us. In the manner of Wikipedia (but without perhaps its amateur pool of contributors), the database would become increasingly accurate and subject to oversight, its own expert editors emerging over time in a dialogical—perhaps even dialectical—format. The database itself might be a new kind of literature or a new kind of historical notation. Or not. But it’s an idea worth playing with. Other much more playful digital options for a new form of literary history may make traditionalists cringe. For example, educators are currently exploring the possibilities of using online games or game formats as educational tools and platforms for scholarly work. While certainly action games have been taken seriously as information and skills-building tools by the U.S. military, organizations such as the Instructional Technology Forum and the New Media Consortium (now located in Austin, Texas, and one of the largest developers of educational space in Second Life) sponsor annual conferences, disseminate white papers, encourage online debate, and offer teaching seminars about integrating games into educational contexts and, increasingly, into scholarly research contexts.39 Virtual worlds that mimic MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) offer users the opportunity to synthesize visual, oral, and textual communication and communicate in real time to others located anywhere in the world. These internationalized, multiplatform game environments reverse, or simply multiply, the elements constituting the hierarchy of value of text and image implicit in wiki structures, where text predominates and is supplemented by images. In game worlds, visuality is dominant, though a virtual world such as Second Life offers text-based chat and IM (instant messaging), as well as direct connections to Web sites of all kinds, including communications sites such as Skype and YouTube. If Second Life can offer virtual Hamlet in a simulated Globe Theater, visually re-create real-world cities such as Paris or Dublin, contain virtual libraries that access some of the best real-world libraries through interactive technology, and provide a truly globally accessible meeting space, it is possible to imagine it eventually including radically visualized history projects. What a global literary history that is hybridized in visual/textual format might be is implied in projects such as the online journal Vectors, edited by Tara McPherson. McPherson describes Vectors as a peer-reviewed journal that explores the multimedia potential of digital environments that would allow for immersive possibilities of academic research and for more “expressive vernaculars.” The online journal is dedicated to publishing work that could not be published in print form, and the project brings academic researchers together with programmers to construct new online, interactive cosmopolitanism 721 multimedia research-dissemination environments. (Interestingly, when in a recent interview McPherson comments on using wikis for scholarship, she specifically notes how the “democratic” wiki structure runs head-on against ingrained academic resistances to collaborative work and to revision of individual work by others.)40 The idea of the Web as a global space has its own set of problems, including issues related to access, increasing control by business, surveillance by power, and censorship. I want to be clear that I am not advocating that literary history turn itself into YouTube, declaring MySpace a model for academic debate, or even contending that the culture of expertise that defines university research be abandoned in favor of amateur impressionism. I am not suggesting that the Web offers us a new liberatory space of being, a freedom from the body, or a clean new space of community; Web converts’ utopian claims for inherent digital meritocracy, democratizing virtual space, or compensatory politics are weak given the evidence that rather than being a classless, raceless, “neutral” space, the Web is a space of constructed identities and political affiliations that carries all the baggage of the real world. Fears about new media are often justified—the overload of images it casts upon us, the gross and violent stimulants with which it hardens our aesthetic and ethical senses, the contempt for history and the human that it often engenders, the homogeneous primary audience that it frequently courts.41 I merely suggest in the manner of Said that one need not idealize the aesthetic in order nonetheless to appreciate and commit oneself to it in a worldly manner. Burgeoning Web technologies may offer literary historians new and different interactive formats that enable real dialogic interaction between scholars and open our field to broader participation and broader readership. In the context of global literary history, there should be a way to realize in our own field what Guillermo Gómez-Peña articulates: “What we want is to ‘politicize’ the debate; to ‘brownify’ virtual space; to ‘spanglishize the Net’; to ‘infect’ the lingua franca; to exchange a different sort of information—mythical, poetical, political, performative, imagistic; and on top of that to find grassroots applications to new technologies and hopefully to do all this with humor and intelligence.”42 To create an interactive, commonly held platform and database for world literature is to create a commons, one of the most troubling concepts for capitalism, including academic capitalism. Today we in the scholarly community tend to demonize the Web, fetishize it, or dismiss it as nonserious. I think, however, that organization has consequences, and that the role of interactive, online technologies as a method of producing and disseminating literary history will need to be at least part of our debate about global literary history. University of Tennessee 722 new literary history NOTES 1 Allen Ginsberg, “America,” in Collected Poems: 1947–1980 (New York: Harper and Row, 1984). 2 Quote from Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), xi. 3 For a provocative interpretation of comparative studies, see Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell’s collection Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2007). 4 Michael Denning, “The Novelists’ International,” in The Novel, vol. 1, History, Geography, and Culture, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006), 703–25; Thomas Pavel, “The Novel in Search of Itself: A Historical Morphology,” Hans Gumbrecht, “The Roads of the Novel,” and Margaret Cohen, “The Chronotopes of the Sea,” in The Novel, vol. 2, Forms and Themes, ed. Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006), 3–31, 611–46, 647–66. 5 See, for instance, articles by Chiun-Chieh Huang, “The Defining Character of Chinese Historical Thinking,” and Jörn Rüsen, “Crossing Cultural Borders: How to Understand Historical Thinking in China and the West,” in History and Theory 46, no. 2 (2007): 180–88, 189–209. In a different context, however, Stephen Greenblatt has pointed out that the idea that an entire nation has unified historical paradigms is problematic, even potentially disturbing in its reconstitution of volk mentalities. See Greenblatt, “Racial Memory and Literary History,” in Rethinking Literary History: A Dialogue on Theory, ed. Linda Hutcheon and Mario J. Valdés (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), 50–62. 6 Paul Ricoeur, The Reality of the Historical Past (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette Univ. Press, 1984), 2–3. Ricoeur’s magisterial last investigation of these same questions can be found in his Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004). 7 For examples, see F. R. Ankersmit, History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1994); Hans Kellner, Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1989). The December 2007 issue of History and Theory (46, no. 4) was, in fact, devoted to “revision” and featured essays problematizing the topic by Giorgos Antoniou and Jonathan Gorman. For an illuminating discussion of History and Theory, see Richard T. Vann, “Turning Linguistic: History and Theory and History and Theory, 1960–1975,” in A New Philosophy of History, ed. Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), 40–69. 8 For a discussion of New Literary History’s own important role in that discussion, see Jonathan Culler, “New Literary History and European Theory,” New Literary History 25, no. 4 (1994): 869–79, as well as the essays in New Directions in Literary History, ed. Ralph Cohen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974), which are of this moment of debate about poststructuralism and historical study. 9 Nancy F. Partner, “Historicity in an Age of Reality-Fictions,” in New Philosophy of History, ed. Ankersmit and Kellner, 22. 10 Jerome McGann, “Literature, Meaning, and the Discontinuity of Fact,” in The Uses of Literary History, ed. Marshall Brown (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1995), 47. 11 Jonathan Arac, “What Is the History of Literature?” in Uses of Literary History, ed. Brown, 29. 12 Denis Hollier, ed., A New History of French Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989). 13 This is the argument made in some quarters about cultural representation within traditionally Western discourses such as literary history. See, for example, essays by Hutcheon and Valdés in Rethinking Literary History. In that volume, Walter Mignolo writes: “Western categories of thought put non-Western categories . . . in a double bind. Either interactive cosmopolitanism 723 non-Western cultural practices are so different from Western ones that they could not be considered properly philosophy, literature, history, religion, science, or what have you. Or, on the contrary, in order to be recognized, they have to become similar and assimilated to Western conceptions of cultural practices and social organization.” Walter D. Mignolo, “Rethinking the Colonial Model,” in Rethinking Literary History, ed. Hutcheon and Valdés, 160. 14 Jane Gallop, “The Historicization of Literary Studies and the Fate of Close Reading,” Profession (2007): 181–86. 15 Claudia Stokes, Writers in Retrospect: The Rise of American Literary History, 1875–1910 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2006), 3. 16 Stokes’s point is related to Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s argument that, in fact, the humanities disciplines today often serve the state and the concept of nationhood rather faithfully, replicating the notion of national borders in our definitions of disciplinary boundaries. See Harpham, “Between Humanity and the Homeland: The Evolution of an Institutional Concept,” American Literary History 18, no. 2 (2006): 245–61. 17 Hans Robert Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” in New Directions in Literary History, ed. Cohen, 14. 18 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), 48–49. 19 Homi K. Bhabha, “A Personal Response,” in Rethinking Literary History, ed. Hutcheon and Valdés, 196 and 200 (hereafter cited in text). 20 Hutcheon, “Rethinking the National Model,” in Rethinking Literary History, ed. Hutcheon and Valdés, 30. 21 Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” in New Directions in Literary History, ed. Cohen, 125–26. 22 Mark Poster, “Cyberdemocracy: The Internet and the Public Sphere,” in Reading Digital Culture, ed. David Trend (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 267 (hereafter cited in text). 23 Exuberant early claims made for digital anticapitalism or libertarian meritocracy deserve a skeptical eye unless corroborated by empirical research; such claims appear in documents as politically different as the 1986 “The Conscience of a Hacker,” also known as “The Hacker’s Manifesto” (http://www.phrack.com/issues.html?issue=7&id=3&mode=txt) and Glenn Reynolds’s An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths (Nashville, TN: Nelson Current, 2006). Reynolds is the author of one of the most popular blogs of all time, Instapundit (http:// www.instapundit.com), which was begun in 2001 and which according to “sitemeter” (http://www.sitemeter.com) averages over 225,000 hits per day. 24 Danah M. Boyd and Nicole B. Ellison, “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (2007): 211. 25 Hugo Liu et al., “Unraveling the Taste Fabric of Social Networks,” International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems 2, no. 1 (2006): 42–71; Judith Donath and Danah Boyd, “Public Displays of Connection,” BT Technology Journal 22, no. 4 (2004): 71–82; Dara Byrne, “The Future of (the) Race: Identity, Discourse and the Rise of Computer-Mediated Public Spheres,” in Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media, ed. Anna Everett (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 15–38; Leela Damodaran and Wendy Olphert, Informing Digital Futures: Strategies for Citizen Engagement (Dordrecht, Neth.: Springer, 2006); and Linda Leung, Virtual Ethnicity: Race, Resistance and the World Wide Web (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005). 26 Buzzell’s blog itself incorporated interactive components, such as the “mail-call” feature that allowed him to answer readers’ questions at the blog site. Colby Buzzell, My War: Killing Time in Iraq (New York: Berkeley Caliber, 2005), 200. Other recent examples include the “Don’t tase me bro” incident of September 17, 2007, in which Andrew Meyer was tasered by police at a John Kerry rally; the incident generated scores of YouTube videos (including spoofs) and comments, leading to a New York Times report, an appearance by Meyer with 724 new literary history Matt Lauer on Today in October, and the election of the word “tase” as a runner-up for Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year (2007). 27 Tizianna Terranova, “Demonstrating the Globe: Virtual Action in the Network Society,” in Virtual Globalization: Virtual Spaces/Tourist Spaces, ed. David Holmes (London: Routledge, 2001), 111. 28 Available as of December 12, 2007, at Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About. 29 In this sense it answers Fredric Jameson’s objection to Bakhtinian dialogue as metaphorized le style indirect libre, “which can only be written, which has no spoken analogue, and the notion of ‘dialogic’ is a kind of overlap.” Response to Jonathan Hall, “Dialogic History of Narrative,” in Rewriting Literary History, ed. Tak-Wai Wong and M. A. Abbas (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Univ. Press, 1984), 276. 30 Analyzing 4.2 million editors and 58 million edits, many of which can be accounted for by bot edits (automated programs designed to recognize specific kinds of damaging behavior, such as profanity), Priedhorsky et al. found that “The top 10% of editors by number of edits contributed 86% of the PWVs [content views], and top 0.1 % contributed 44%—nearly half. The domination of these very top contributors is increasing over time. Of the top 10 contributors of PWVs, nine had made well over 10,000 edits.” Reid Priedhorsky et al., “Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia,” http://www-users.cs.umn. edu/~reid/papers/group282-priedhorsky.pdf. 31 Felipe Ortega, Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona, and Gregorio Robles, “On the Inequality of Contributions to Wikipedia,” in Proceedings of the 41st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4439009. 32 One much-remarked incident concerned John Seigenthaler Sr., whom someone falsely reported as involved in the J. F. K. assassination (documented by USA Today at http://www. usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-11-29-wikipedia-edit_x.htm). 33 Scholarly communities are now investigating how their work can be synchronized with Wikipedia’s software. See Thomas Tunsch, “Museum Documentation and Wikipedia.de: Possibilities, Opportunities and Advantages for Scholars and Museums,” at http://www. archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/tunsch/tunsch.html (accessed November 18, 2008). Educause has published a research bulletin (vol. 2008, no. 3 [February 5, 2008]) titled Supporting Knowledge Creation: Using Wikis for Group Collaboration that addresses some of these issues. It may be a sign of scholars’ increasing acceptance of Wikipedia’s effectiveness and reliability that so many now post resumés and narrative autobiographies to the site. 34 There is much emerging research on tag clouds; for an example of one empirical study, see Marti A. Hearst and Daniela Rosner, “Tag Clouds: Data Analysis Tool or Social Signifier?” School of Information, Univ. of California, Berkeley, http://flamenco.berkeley. edu/papers/tagclouds.pdf and “Folksonomy,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Folksonomy (both accessed November 18, 2008). 35 James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Anchor Books, 2005). 36 For an example of an innovative and longstanding online journal that uses threads this way, see EBR: Electronic Book Review, edited by Joseph Tabbi at the Univ. of Illinois at Chicago, http://www.electronicbookreview.com. 37 Valdés, “Rethinking the History of Literary History,” in Rethinking Literary History, ed. Hutcheon and Valdés, 82 (quoting five line items from his notes from Ralph Cohen’s seminar in Toronto, fall 1981). 38 Wai Chee Dimock, “Genre as World System: Epic and Novel on Four Continents,” Narrative 14, no. 1 (2006): 85. 39 See the “Instructional Technology Forum” at http://it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/Games_Resources.html and the “New Media Consortium,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ New_Media_Consortium (both accessed November 18, 2008). The interactive and dialogic potential defining game environments was evidenced at the December 2007 multidisci- interactive cosmopolitanism 725 plinary conference “The Evolution of Communication,” sponsored by the New Media Consortium in Second Life, a virtual reality owned and run by Linden Corporation (see http://secondlife.com). The interactive format of the lectures, which combined lecture format (the plenary was Howard Rheingold), PowerPoint, chat, instant messaging with multiple interlocutors, and voice conversation hinted at how game worlds provide new models of interactivity that may be carried into entirely new educational contexts. See also the “Serious Games Initiative” founded at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, DC, at http://www.seriousgames.org/about2.html. 40 See Vectors at http://vectorsjournal.org/index.php?page=4. Vectors is aligned with HASTAC, the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, a consortium of universities originally founded by Cathy Davidson at Duke University and David Theo Goldberg at the University of California, Irvine, which according to Tara McPherson is “trying to broaden public conversation about what the role of the humanities and technological development and distribution might be.” Hear the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) interview of McPherson by Matt Pasiewicz, December 15, 2005, at http://connect.educause.edu/blog/mpasiewicz/aninterviewwithtaramcpher/1721. 41 For this perspective, see Geoffrey Hartman’s “Public Memory and Its Discontents,” in Uses of Literary History, ed. Brown, 73–91. For a study that argues for the growing multiculturalism of the Web, see Leung, Virtual Ethnicity. 42 Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “The Virtual Barrio @ the Other Frontier (or the Chicago Interneta),” in Reading Digital Culture, ed. Trend, 286.