The Digital Humanities, Inc.: Literary Criticism and the Fate of a Profession andrew kopec ANDREW KOPEC is an assistant profes- sor in the Department of English and Linguistics at Indiana University–Purdue University, Fort Wayne, where he teaches classes in American literature to 1900 and general education. He is complet- ing a book manuscript, “Pacing Panic: American Romanticism and the Business Cycle,” which reframes Romantic litera- ture in the nineteenth-century United States as an art of high finance. Rather than occasional criticism by amateurs, I should think the whole en- terprise might be seriously taken in hand by professionals. Perhaps I use a distasteful igure, but I have the idea that what we need is Criticism, Inc. —John Crowe Ransom, “Criticism, Inc.” (1937) his is a quantitative study: but its units are linguistic and rhetorical. And the reason is simple: for me, formal analysis is the great accomplishment of literary study, and is therefore also what any new approach—quantitative, digital, evolutionary, whatever—must prove itself against: prove that it can do formal analysis, better than we already do. Or at least: equally well, in a diferent key. Otherwise, what is the point? —Franco Moretti, “Style, Inc.: Relections on Seven housand Tit les (British Novels, 1740–1850)” (2009) A T AN ANXIOUS MOMENT IN THE HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM, the contributors to Rereading the New Criticism (2012) turn to the profession’s past to salvage its future. “hrough this proj- ect,” Miranda Hickman, one of the volume’s editors, explains, “we seek to . . . consider what New Critical theories and critical methods might ofer for both literary and cultural studies in the twenty-irst century” (“Rereading” 3–4). In reference to the diverse formal- isms that Marjorie Levinson has discussed under the rubric of “the new formalism,” another contributor wonders, “Why do so many scholars want close reading back?” “[W]hat is at stake in the cur- rent discussion of close reading,” she discerns, “is what close reading functioned to deine and validate—both literature and the profession of literary studies” (Devereux 222, 224). Likewise tying professional identity to the practice of close reading, Jane Gallop has argued that “the most valuable thing English ever had to ofer was the very thing [ PMLA © 2016 andrew kopec PMLA 131.2 (2016), published by the Modern Language Association of America 324