Close reading has and will continue to serve literary scholars very well. However, in an era of digital libraries and readily available information, relying solely on close reading means missing the forest for the trees. This is at least in part because the nature of 'evidence', as Jockers calls it, has changed dramatically. To tackle the sheer scope of this 'evidence', he emboldens today's students of literature to become 'adept at reading and gathering evidence from individual texts and equally adept at accessing and mining digital text repositories.' However, even if I very much agree with his take, I'm at a loss at how to actually become that sort of student, particularly when I personally feel like success in literature studies is very much dependent on 'mining' and subsequently finding those diamonds in the rough rather than being part of a larger-scale, communal excavation.
This does not stop me from being very jealous of my colleagues and friends from linguistics, which have developed text-analysis programs and learnt to work with large corpora and from ardently wishing we, in literary studies, were more inclined towards adopting a 'bird's eye view' of literature. Maybe this is because I envision that we could look at what linguists are and have been doing for a while and band together (instead of working in isolation) and cover the ever-expanding 'river of prose.' I also imagine that beyond the enhanced understanding of the literary history promised by the unification of the macro and micro scale, we may find patterns that may provide us with as much comfort, amazement, delight, etc. as our favourite book passages do. And whilst that sounds slightly ridiculous, what would happen if employing macroanalysis resulted in data that would relate directly to my life experiences and provide me with the same comfort that close reading does? What would happen if I could use macroanalysis to, say, find out that an overwhelming majority of the people writing about living through a pandemic had experiences that echo mine? Would that be comforting in any way?It absolutely would be, for me. I think it would be very encouraging to be able to distill the voices of multiple authors into a unitary and resounding: 'You are not alone.'
All this is not to say that I would trade away being knee-deep in close reading but rather that macroanalysis would be equally important in shaping my perception about yesteryear and about past people that, like me, have laughed, cried and lived once.
Forests/trees, mining/finding a diamond, flying in the sky/being on the ground: metaphors turn out to be useful ways to understand the tectonic shifts (see what I did there) that reading at scale poses to literary studies! But anyway: when I read your post, Eduard, it made me think of what is typically valued in canonised works of literature, which seems to me to be exceptional rather than diurnal experiences: characters who experience great love affairs or great tragedies, or find themselves in unusual circumstances, or are embedded in narratives that resolve themselves satisfactorily - as Wilde put it, 'The good ended happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.' So I'm wondering how one squares that kind of exceptionalism that seems to me to underlie most texts - the very thing that makes a text interesting enough that a reader will want to pick it up, and keep reading it - with the kind of shared experience you're invoking here?