| This dissertation examines the relationship between the aesthetic, the digital text, and the politics of scholarly work. The aesthetic---which articulates a relationship between ideality and materiality through which power relations can be conceptualized and naturalized---emerged in the eighteenth century as a paradigm for understanding artistic, governmental, social, and gender relations. The intellectual economy it mobilizes is, I argue, central to the emerging academic discipline of textual scholarship from the seventeenth century onwards, as a mode through which to articulate a space of cultural power for textual professionals. Understanding how this cultural power is grounded proves crucial to a critical understanding of digital textuality and its reception in the mainstream academy: the aesthetic insists on a relation between ideality and materiality, and between universalism and detailism, whose instability in the context of digital textuality is seen as threatening the disciplines of textual scholarship. In fact, I argue, the intellectual inheritance of the aesthetic in literary studies produces systematic misconceptions concerning the potential role and significance of digital textuality: as an emblem of absent and problematic materiality, unmanaged detailism, and quantificatory reductionism. These misconceptions disable the modern academy in its dealings with the digital text. In Chapter 1, "The Problem of Scholarly Identity in the Digital Age," I examine the formation of scholarly identity in the modern academy and in relation to the digital space. In Chapter 2, "The Body Encoded," I discuss the ramifications of the aesthetic's theory of materiality in relation to the digital text, looking in particular at textual editing and its gender politics. In Chapter 3, "Detailism, Digital Texts, and the Problem of Pedantry," I trace the development of a class-inflected discourse on detailism and pedantry and its impact on digital text analysis research. In Chapter 4, "Ambiguity, Aesthetics, and the Meaning of Markup," I examine the role of ambiguity and indeterminacy in literary studies and in digital representation. In Chapter 5, "Disciplinary Identities and Digital Scholarship," I discuss the dissonance between the transformative claims made on behalf of the digital text, and the social and political limitations on their impact in the modern academy. |
