Franco Moretti: A Response

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (3) ◽  
pp. 686-689 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franco Moretti
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
Franco Moretti ◽  
Time And Energy ◽  
Historical Issues

First of all, thanks to wai chee dimock, the editor of PMLA, and to all contributors for having put this feature together. Devoting time and energy to someone else's work is a very generous thing to do, and I'm grateful to all of you for your attention. Really.Since Dimock made clear from the start that the discussion would be “on Distant Reading the book,” I will not address Johanna Drucker's and Catherine Nicholson's essays, which, though very interesting, concern methodological and historical issues rather than the book itself. Otherwise, my reply will proceed as follows: a prologue on my relationship to distance; some retrospective thoughts on Distant Reading; a few responses on “facts,” interpretations, “reading,” and “readers”; some reflections on modeling; and a conclusion on what Lisa Marie Rhody calls the “dehumanizing” nature of “scientific discourse.”

Franco Moretti as Satirist

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (3) ◽  
pp. 681-685
Author(s):  
Bethany Wiggin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
New Left ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
Shelf Space ◽  
Franco Moretti ◽  
The Revolution

My first encounter with Franco Moretti's work was “conjectures on world literature,” from which his book distant reading takes its title. The essay was first published in 2000 in the New Left Review, the original home of seven of the ten essays reprinted in Distant Reading. I happened across it in 2004 amid a fit of procrastination fueled by anxious uncertainty. I was unsure about how, or even whether, to revise a dissertation on popular novels in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany, many of which had been translated from the French. No one really knew much about them. They were miserably cataloged; generations of Prussian librarians had been ordered not to collect them—and to throw away any that had managed to take up shelf space in the first place. In 1795 the reactionary, antirepublican Johann Georg Heinzmann opined, “So lange die Welt stehet, sind keine Erscheinungen so merkwürdig gewesen als in Deutschland die Romanleserey und in Frankreich die Revolution” (“Since the beginning of time nothing was more noteworthy than the revolution in France and the reading of novels in Germany”; 139; my trans.). But an awful lot of these novels are now gone. Critics sometimes say they were read to shreds. And whereas Heinzmann—and generations of state and church censors before him—cared a great deal about the republican potential of German Romanleserey (“reading of novels”), I wasn't confident anyone did today.

Distant Reading. Franco Moretti.

2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 152-154
Author(s):  
Peter Boot
Keyword(s):  
Distant Reading ◽  
Franco Moretti

scholarly journals RESIL MOJARES AND THE CRISIS OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE IN THE PHILIPPINES

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 80
Author(s):  
Amado Anthony III Gracia Mendoza
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
Budget Cuts ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
The World ◽  
Perceived Effects ◽  
Franco Moretti ◽  
The 1950S

After its heyday from the 1950s until the early 1970s, a crisis in the field of comparative literature was declared present by its practitioners during the 1980s. The effects of the perceived crisis were felt not only during conferences but also through brutal budget cuts and the downsizing of comparative literature departments across the world.   In the decades that followed, various attempts to address the crisis were made by critics such as Franco Moretti, Pascale Casanova, Alexander Beecroft, among many others. As a result, methods and concepts such as “distant reading,” “evolutionary literary history,” “literary ecologies,” and “world republic of letters” easily became the theoretical and methodological bulwark of numerous comparative literature departments against the perceived effects of the crisis.  Incidentally, in his seminal Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel, Resil Mojares deployed similar ideas and concepts, however, to different ends.  This paper, then, is first an attempt to analyze Mojares’ deployment of the said concepts and methods vis-à-vis to that of Beecroft, Casanova, and Moretti’s. Finally, the paper also seeks to identify and elaborate on specific implications and possibilities made visible by Mojares’ methodological interventions in the field and practice of comparative literature in the Philippines.Keywords: Crisis, comparative literature, literary history, Mojares, methodological intervention, Philippines.Cite as: Mendoza III, A.A.G. (2018). Resil Mojares and the crisis of comparative literature in the Philippines. Journal of Nusantara Studies, 3(2), 80-91. http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol3iss2pp80-91

scholarly journals Categorizaciones de la lectura y praxis cultural en la era digital: distant reading vs. close reading

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (74) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Eloy Martos Núñez ◽  
Aitana Martos García
Keyword(s):  
Digital Age ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
Current Context ◽  
Franco Moretti ◽  
Intensive Reading

El artículo examina los conceptos de distant reading yclose reading en función del contexto de abundancia deinformación y de los distintos fenómenos de la praxiscultural de la era digital, desde los modelos educativosclásicos hasta las modernas corrientes culturales. Revisalas aproximaciones de Franco Moretti y otros autores.Concluye que en el actual contexto de hibridacióny de globalizacion de contenidos, la escuela y la bibliotecadeben aprender de las prácticas culturales alternativasy hacer un esfuerzo por recuperar la lectura intensivabajo otros supuestos y con otras estrategias.AbstractThrough a review of the work of Franco Moretti andothers, this paper examines the concept of distantreading and close reading in recognition of abundantinformation and diverse phenomena of cultural praxisof the digital age, ranging from the traditional educationmodels to modern cultural currents. The paperconcludes that in the current context of globalizationand hybridization of contents, the school and the libraryshould learn from alternative cultural practicesand strive to return to intensive reading under otherassumptions and other strategies.

Review of Franco Moretti: "Distant Reading"

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Axel Perez-Trujillo
Keyword(s):  
Distant Reading ◽  
Franco Moretti

scholarly journals Leer de otra manera: la distant reading y la didáctica de la literatura en el entorno digital

2016 ◽  
pp. 33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gloria Garcia Rivera ◽  
Angélica García-Manso
Keyword(s):  
Distant Reading ◽  
Franco Moretti

<p>Se revisa el concepto de distant reading y las teorías de Franco Moretti. Son analizadas sus repercusiones en orden a la didáctica de la literatura –en lo que supone de cambio de foco y de inversión de metodologías– que hasta ahora se centraban en lo singular de la obra literaria, para dar paso a una percepción cuantitativa y que atiende más al reconocimiento de patrones textuales que al estudio propio de la lectura intensiva.</p>

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