How does a literary historian end up thinking in terms of z-scores, principal component analysis, and clustering coefficients? The essays in
Distant Reading led to a new and often contested paradigm of literary analysis. In presenting them here Franco Moretti reconstructs his intellectual trajectory, the theoretical influences over his work, and explores the polemics that have often developed around his positions.
From the evolutionary model of ‘Modern European Literature, ‘ through the geo-cultural insights of ‘Conjectures of World Literature’ and ‘Planet Hollywood, ‘ to the quantitative findings of ‘Style, inc.’ and the abstract patterns of ‘Network Theory, Plot Analysis, ‘ the book follows two decades of conceptual development, organizing them around the metaphor of ‘distant reading, ‘ that has come to define-well beyond the wildest expectations of its author-a growing field of unorthodox literary studies.
Tentang Penulis
Franco Moretti is a Professor Emeritus at Stanford, where he founded the Center for the Study of the Novel and the Literary Lab. He writes regularly for New Left Review and is a Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is the author of, among other books, Far Country, The Bourgeois and Graphs, Maps, Trees. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. His book Distant Reading won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.