ABSTRACT

An exploration of the political potential of the “digital humanities,” Trettien examines the interplay of construction and destruction across technology, history, and interpretation in literary studies. Taking issue with some of the more sweeping and reductive generalizations about those engaged in DH work, she takes a cross-historical perspective on what it means to intervene in the “material mechanisms” of the systems that carry forward literary expression and history. The term “creative destruction,” a modality of interpretive labor informed by the thought of Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Nietzsche, points to the powerfully disruptive potential of any act of interpretation that seeks to creatively re-contextualize and re-fragment texts and cultural contexts.