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 | | Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History by Franco Moretti ISBN-10: 9781844671854 ISBN-10: 1-84467-185-2 ISBN-13: 9781844671854 ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-185-4 Paperback 2007-09-01 Verso Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description The 'great iconoclast of literary criticism' reinvents the study of the novel. Franco Moretti argues heretically that literature scholars should stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead. He insists that such a move could bring new lustre to a tired field, one that in some respects is among "the most backwards disciplines in the academy." Literary study, he argues, has been random and unsystematic. For any given period scholars focus on a select group of a mere few hundred texts: the canon. As a result, they have allowed a narrow distorting slice of history to pass for the total picture. Moretti offers bar charts, maps, and time lines instead, developing the idea of "distant reading" into a full-blown experiment in literary historiography, where the canon disappears into the larger literary system. Charting entire genres—the epistolary, the gothic, and the historical novel—as well as the literary output of countries such as Japan, Italy, Spain, and Nigeria, he shows how literary history looks significantly different from what is commonly supposed and how the concept of aesthetic form can be radically redefined. | ||
Reviews | ||
A Good Experiment, and Worth a Read I like to see any new attempts at rigorously analyzing qualitative data, especially attempts that don't merely rely on simple coding. I also like to see visual and schematic thinking in action. Moretti's book isn't quite a revelation, not quite the start of a revolution, but it's worth exploring. Maybe one day he'll be acknowledged as one of the granddaddies of a new kind of thinking. Absolutely worth reading and digesting, but don't necessarily expect it to rock your world. | ||
A fresh approach to literary history Moretti has added a completely novel dimension to literary history, which traditionally has addressed only individual works, but never broader trends. If literary scholars don't recognize this terrain and why it is important, sociologists of knowledge certainly will. Graphs on the growth of production of novels, for example, reveal the characteristic curves of innovation diffusion. Aggregate quantitative results open the way for solider explanations of the relationship between literature and its ambient socities. | ||
A good new approach, but problems in the execution Moretti uses diagrams as a way of investigating literary history. He is pretty succesful considering the difficulty of the task. The important part of the book is the diagrams. Moretti wisely admits that his commentary is secondary; supersedable with better later interpretations. The best diagrams are in the "graph" section. His graph of the number of books published per year at the begining of the book trade in countries like Britian, Japan, and Nigeria does seem to show a similarly shaped ramp up at different historical periods; and his discussion of the effect of the number of books published on readers is good. His diagram showing the numbers of books published in England in the epistolary, gothic, historical genres does show these genres as effectively replacements for one another in the market; the next genre rising as the last genre fades. The diagram showing the percentage of male and female authors is interesting. Unfortunately, that graph doesn't use a five year running average like some of his other graphs so his discussion of a pattern of "oscillation" is unpersuasive. It is probably just random "noise". The diagrams in the "map" section would be improved if Moretti returned to his previous practice of showing the underlying geographic features. The best diagram in the "tree" section is the diagram that shows the development of concept of the "clue" in detective stories. The diagrams in this section are inspired by diagrams of relatedness shown by genetic drift among human populations, as shown in the important book "The History and Geography of Human Genes". (One of the authors of that book also discusses and critiques Moretti's approach in the afterward) The diagrams themselves are more related to cladistics- a method of estimating relationships between species from the different species's properties- than to the "genetic drift" diagrams Moretti was inspired by. These "tree" diagrams show promise but a potential problem is the more complex structure of literary influence as compared to biological influence. Each author reads many books and can be influenced by elements of any book they read. On the other hand, I wouldn't be suprised if, in 50 years, anaylsis of digital libraries with AI is used to do such complex literary cladistics. | ||
Interesting...but strangely organized Nice attempt to approach literature with scientific methodology, which is like a breath of fresh air in the current irrational climate of literary theory. But the book is very strangely organized: there are three chapters, about graphs, maps, and trees! It's like writing a physics book called "Equations, diagrams, curves". With a chapter for each, without regard for the natural, substantive subdivisions in the field. Or it would be like organizing a library of books by size rather than subject. Science isn't about nice graphs, but about making hypotheses and testing them on data. FM simply makes a graph, chart, or tree, and comments on it. Commendable attempt. But a modest beginning. And an annoying manner to write without verbs. | ||
Moretti changed the way I think about studying literature This book proposes an entirely different approach to literature. Where criticism and study have traditionally focused on a single work or collection of works, Moretti's provocative thesis suggests studying hundreds or even thousands of books, and by no means restricting the field to the accepted canon; rather, he offers a critical framework based on cartographic priciples, and argues persuasively that this method will yield far more interesting results. This book will probably become standard reading in English college courses, especially ones dealing with literary criticism and theory, but it is really essential for anyone who is interested in literature, and new ways of thinking about it. | ||