Kunnen machines (literatuur) lezen?

Samenvatting

In this essay, we discuss distant reading as one of the various takes on reading that currently prevail in literary scholarship as well as the teaching of literature. We do so in the light of three concepts of reading, which for various reasons can be considered interrelated: close reading, surface reading and distant reading. We introduce a novel, two-tier dissection of distant reading and demonstrate how this view relates distant reading to the abstract goals of artificial intelligence. Our analysis foregrounds the notable absence of reader-response theory in current Digital Literary Studies. We argue that the field has much to gain from more explicit attempts at simulating the so-called ‘natural’ reading process of individual readers.