Alex's Response

From English 194 Wiki

McCarty says that models are constantly mutable and able to evolve, but cannot by definition ever be perfect. What they allow us to do is learn from their imperfections. If the model cannot account for some aspect of its target text, or accounts for something that is foreign to the text, then that will teach us something about the text itself, namely, that it cannot be modelled how we thought, which would presumably also translate into something more concrete. The model will never account for everything in a text and nothing outside of a text; if it did it would be something else.

Is this like the Borges story where a map of an Empire is made so detailed that it becomes as large as the Empire? It seems like perhaps the only perfect model is the original text.

If this is the case and there is no perfect model for a text, is there also no way to perfectly map a text or draw a text? Can there be a perfect simulation or game of a text? If not, then, as McCarty suggests about models, these methods only amount to, or yield, more theory.

So by using these models we can spiral around the truths of the text. We can examine the process of modelling as "not an achievement but an approximating convergence." Something about this seems unsatisfying to me. I had lofty hopes that these methods of literary analysis would help generate more definitive truths about text than traditional close reading or textual analysis. Could this still be the case?