The location of knowledge

Traditional literary scholars positioned knowledge as something discovered within literary texts. The role of the critic was to find and describe this knowledge. But technological changes in the way texts are produced and consumed threaten the traditional concept of the literary object, and what constitutes literary knowledge. Recently, Franco Moretti has proposed a scheme of 'distant reading' which uses empirical methods to quantify the rise and fall of genres. These sorts of empirical schemes take advantage of data mining and digitised texts. However, this paper suggests that both traditional and empirical approaches to the construction of literary knowledge elide the role of the reader and interpretation.