How distant is “distant reading”?

Unorthodox Literary Studies?

Table of Content

• Modern European Literature: A Geographical Sketch (1994)• Conjectures on World Literature (2000)• The Slaughterhouse of Literature (2000)• Planet Hollywood (2001)• More Conjectures (2003)• Evolution, World Systems, Weltliteratur (2005)• The End of the Beginning: A Reply to Christopher Prendergast

(2006)• The Novel: History and Theory (2008)• Style, Inc.: Reflections on 7000 titles (2009)• Network Theory, Plot Analysis (2011)

Moretti’s Beginnings

• Interpretazioni di Eliot (1975)• Letteratura e ideologie negli anni

Trenta inglesi (1976)• Signs taken for wonders (1983)• Il romanzo di formazione (1986)• Opere mondo (1994)• Atlante del romano Europeo (1997)• Il romanzo (2001)• Graphs, maps, trees (2005)• La cultura del romanzo (2008)• The Bourgeois (2013)

Moretti is in many respects an old-fashioned historian of literature who has not entirely given up on the 1970s search to create a happy union between materialist and formalist approaches to literature […](M. Caesar, Franco Moretti and the World Literature Debate, 2007)

What is Distant Reading?

That fatal formula had been a late addition to the paper, where it was initially specified, in an allusion to the basic procedure of quantitative history, by the words 'serial reading'. Then, somehow, 'serial' disappeared and 'distant' remained. Partly, it was meant as a joke; a moment of relief in a rather relentless argument. But no one seems to have taken it as a joke, and they were probably right.

Distant reading: where distance, let me repeat it, is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems. And if, between the very small and the very large, the text itself disappears, well, it is one of those cases when one can justifiably say, Less is more. If we want to understand the system in its entirety, we must accept losing something.

Modern European Literature

“My total reliance on the canon of European masterpieces (as a colleague pointed out, the word ‘great’ seemed ubiquitous in the essay; and it was, I used it fifty-one times!) […] As the years went by, I would move increasingly away from this idea of literature as a collection of masterpieces; and in truth, I feel no nostalgia for what it meant.” (Moretti 2013)

An happy essay

This was an happy essay. Aimed at a non-academic audience, and on such a large topic, it asked for a balance between the abstraction of model-building and the vividness of individual examples – a scene, a character, a line of verse – that would make it worth reading in the first place. This was an happy essay. Evolution, geography and formalism- the three approaches that would define my work for over a decade – first came into systematic contact while writing these pages. I felt curious, full of energy; I kept studying, adding, correcting. I learned a lot, […]

European Literature

Nineteenth CenturyEach problem stimulates a technical device, which retroacts upon it in an attempt to solve or at least contain it. […] And yet, in a beautiful instance of the heterogenesis of aims, in doing so the European novel invents an infinity of new stories that […] project readers into the future

Twentieth CenturyA continent that falls in love with Milan Kundera deserves to end like Atlantis. There is not much more to say, the conditions which have granted European literature his greatness have run their course, and only a miracle could reverse the trend.

The meaning of literature

The book thus follows literature from its instauration in the seventeenth century to a term in mid-nineteenth-century Romantic aesthetic analysis. It suggests that since then literature —in respect of any active social role—has suffered from a kind of repetitive inertia, as it has also been changing its meaning and cultural role. (Reiss 1992)

The rise and fall of Literature

• Literature in the modern sense emerged in the sixteenth-seventeenth century, from within an analytico-referential framework, based in its turn on mathematical thinking.

• The analytico-referential framework became unstable in the second half of the nineteenth century: Frege and the problem of the foundation of arithmetics, mathematical logic etc.

• Hence, literature itself became unstable: avantgarde, theory of literature, formalism and the scientific notion of literariness, Easthope's “from literary to cultural studies” etc.

Vittorini on Cybernetics

Man tries to get rid of his animal and mechanical side, transfering it to the machineHowever, technology has also a liberating aspect that tends to transform the machine in an universal machine on which he can ditch in its entirety the “naturalità” (materiality), even in the case of memory) – cybernetics, machine“a controllo numerico” (controlled by number), automation ecc.

DH and Nineteenth Century• Stylometry, that is to say the use of statistical methods to investigate

literary style (and other things as well, to be fair), was already practiced in North America at the end of the nineteenth century (Mendenhall, Sherman)

• The term was invented by a Polish philosopher, Lutoslawsky, who wanted to establish the chronology of Plato's dialogues.

• C.S. Peirce, a seminal figure in modern semiotics, dismissed the use of statistics in authorship attribution and similar things, after a careful reading of Lutoslawsky's book.

• Henry James ironically mention this methodologies in his fiction. The Figure in the Carpet, a “fable for critics”, is particularly interesting in this regard.

• Nineteenth century is a privileged period for digital literary scholarship.

Warnings

• the risk that digital methods are not as progressive as they look, and might even be conservative, in spite of the hype surrounding them

• the importance of epistemological issues inscribed in the methodologies and in the data, very dangerous because of the assumed scientificity of the process

Thank You!

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