The End of Literature: Machine Reading and Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome

Digital humanities discussions of distant reading, machine reading or not-reading have often turned on a depiction of the field of literary production in which individual texts and authors recede in importance as units of analysis. At the same time, the question of what is specific to the literary in discussions of electronic textuality, or the digital literary, has been under-analyzed. This article contributes to theorizing the digital literary by way of an analysis (or close reading) of the role of machine reading in a postcolonial science fiction novel by Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome. This novel participates in the imagination of electronic textuality and digital forensics at a moment when the imagined possibilities of the digital archive were of intense interest to both cultural critics and literary writers. The figure of the writer of vernacular literature in the novel, I argue, brings together the text's interest in both electronic textuality and the subaltern archive, thus establishing the stakes of the digital precisely on a revamped role for the literary in the context of globalization. As such, Ghosh's novel provides a useful opportunity for re-considering proposals for distant reading in relation to world literary studies and postcolonial criticism.