How Literature Becomes Knowledge: A Case Study

Abstract

The first section of the essay inquires, "Is literature a special kind of knowledge?"; the second, "Is literary criticism a special kind of knowledge?" Through an analysis of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and Samuel Johnson's Dictionary , the essay shows how a literary work's status as an object of knowledge can be determined by its use. The essay proposes that the eighteenth-century notion of "index-learning"–reading a text by way of its index–and its more recent incarnation–"search engine learning"–combined with techniques of close reading can yield a new kind of literary-critical knowledge that might be called "slow reading."

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