[noname123]

apdinin, thanks for sharing your perspective, professionally however, you shared that you chose to go into IT instead of humanities academia.

I see the value of literature in conveying the human experience but don't see the value of literary criticism. I like to read on my own and the direct experiencing with the author with their characters and stories, and forming my own interpretation. I've read Harold Bloom's literary criticism and found it wanting, like an old man hanging onto the vestiges of the past century of whatever someone called the "Western Cannon" and isn't his theory of authors' "anxiety of influence" a bit formulaic, a little bit derivative, a little bit obvious. Not everyone attended Execter and then attended Yale and took Harold Bloom and Bloom's mentor's literary course and read from Shakespeare to Dickson to Faulkner, and said "yes" eagerly and thusly beamed at his literary professor's exaltations as the sunbeams shifted dramatically its orientation on late New England spring afternoons through the ivied windows in the harrowed lecture hall. How do you go about to qualify Jack Kerouac and Murakami who takes as much influence from Jazz? Or novels composed of text messages?

Conversely, I form my own interpretation from Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright and find it a bit presumptuus that these so-called "multi-cultural" AFAM professors cram down their sociological manifestos down in their criticism; why should I care about the African American or Chicano experience told by Henry Gates Sr. pontificating, when I care about my upbringing as an Asian American and see only through that selfish lenses and rightfully so; and instead like the strong black female characters' sexual awakening and relate to the search for that sexual fulfillment under the strict matriarchy and small-mindedness of her ethnic community that has internalized that hatred and hierachies that was imposed upon them such that the enemy has slowly become themselves,

Our reading experiences is a sensuous, viceral and private one and I don't see why a literary professor's interpretation of that great work is worth than my love for erotica or Michael Crichton or a mom's love for Anne Rice or a monkey's love for a banana. As for comparing literature to coding, coding in the sense of "startup's, exit's" is like comparing Emily Dickson to the slave traders traveling in tugboats in deep south, individual monastic pursuit vs. merchantile activity. Emily may be poorer but she certainly didn't feel a need to overcompensate with digital humanities.