Queering the canon in Middlemarch the series. Collaborative Digital Creation and the Crisis in the Humanities

Abstract

 In “The Crisis in Culture”, Hannah Arendt argues that moments of rupture from the tradition can have a revitalising force by pushing individuals to become politicised. In the contemporary world the crisis is everywhere and humanities colleges, often seen as the last bastions of a declining world, are hamstrung by underfunding when not scrapped altogether. In this context, Rebecca Shoptaw’s Middlemarch webseries, a 70-episode video-blog, aired on Youtube from March 15th to December 1st, 2017, takes on a particular significance. Firstly because it is an appropration (Sanders) of a nineteenth century novel, from the periphery of academia – the director and actors are a group of Yale students who draw from George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72) moments of emotional and affective tensions or existential questioning which find a direct echo in their personal lives. Secondly this digital collaborative creation disorients (Ahmed) the traditional practice of textual exegesis to serve a queer agenda. Thirdly it exemplifies the process of “computational subjectivation” (Citton). Indeed, in Middlemarch the series, individuation is attained through media ecology, progressively as the characters film themselves, and each other. Finally the series is worth analysing because it replaces representation by “resonance” (Rosa). In doing so, it widens the scope of textual reception and makes of literature a necesseray human experience in the age of crisis.