It is clear that the advent of computers has so far had almost no impact on the mainstream activities of producing, reading, or studying literary texts. This may be about to change. The prophecy that computing will transform the nature of literary studies is certainly one that we have heard before, but the widespread use of powerful personal computers in the last few years and the increasing role played by the internet, now makes such a forecast seem to carry more weight.[
1] Advocates of these technologies have recently begun to put a new and powerful argument: computer technology for modelling, representing, or creating texts is emerging that will allow us to bring these processes a major step nearer to the activities of actual readers; this in turn will revolutionize understanding of the nature of textuality itself. If this is true, the forthcoming shift in the domain of the literary will be on a tectonic scale, analogous to that brought about in the visual arts by the invention of photography and film.
Two significant developments that underlie this scenario are first, access by computer to large corpora of literary texts together with techniques for examining them (generally called text analysis); and second, the building of hypertext and hypermedia systems. In this essay I will describe some of the advantages of these two technologies and assess some arguments that have been made recently for their theoretical importance.
Important though these developments are, I will suggest that in the immediate future they are likely to remain of interest only to a minority of scholars and readers. This is not only because, as everyone knows, literary scholars have been slow to pick up and use computers for anything other than word processing. A more important reason is that scholars, with few exceptions, have traditionally been uninterested in how actual readers come to understand literary texts (the reader response debate of the last fifteen years has been conducted almost entirely around putative readers, not real ones). Thus, since we lack firm information about the reading process itself, we cannot expect to build computer-based systems that will genuinely enhance the reading process. Some scholars have predicted that the computer will bring about changes in reading itself, making possible a type of interaction with text that the printed book inhibits. While this may be true, it is perhaps imprudent to speculate about changes in such a fundamental human activity as reading when we know so little about how we have accommodated to conventional printed materials over the last several hundred years. The advantages of book technology, which have made the medium so successful, cannot be dismissed so readily. Moreover, the computer technologies that I will be describing are poorly developed and even more poorly distributed. They are still a long way from growing into a David ready to overthrow the Goliath of the book industry. In the last part of this essay I will mention the broader context within which literary computing is situated, and offer an assessment of its future possibilities.
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