On Paragraphs. Scale, Themes, and Narrative Form

Criticism has traditionally worked with the middle of the scale: a text, a scene, a stanza, an episode, an excerpt… An anthropocentric scale, where readers are truly “the measure of things”. But the digital humanities, Alan Liu has written, have changed the coordinates of our work, by “focusing on microlevel linguistic features […] that map directly over macrolevel phenomena.” Exactly. And how does one study literature, in this new situation?

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