Distant Reading:in Favor of Franco Moretti Cover Image

Удаљено читање: у корист Франка Моретија
Distant Reading:in Favor of Franco Moretti

Author(s): Jasmina Radojičić
Subject(s): Theory of Literature
Published by: Институт за књижевност и уметност
Keywords: Franco Moretti; distant reading; quantitative formalism; novel; the bourgeois; class

Summary/Abstract: This paper has as its goal to show the path of development for the theoretical thought of Franco Moretti; one of the most important contemporary historians and literary theorists. Franco Moretti is one of those critics whose work constantly provokes the traditional methods of studying literature, and puts forth a new and radical approach. In the case of Franco Moretti, such an approach entails distancing oneself from the interpretation of individual literary works and literary canon in order to study a much larger collection of texts from the entire literary market (“the great unread”). Following the model of the natural sciences and sociology, such a large database of texts should serve as a reliable pattern for the establishment of a literary system that in its abstraction and stability become the basis for a more scientific and comprehensive study of literature. This, however, does not mean that by Moretti’s advocating of methodological abstraction separates himself from the messy reality of social history. As a primarily Marxist critic, by separating himself from the abstract he searches for the all-encompassing laws and forces in play, so that they can be re- contextualized and confirmed in practice. In a desire to draw attention to Moretti’s methodology, this paper specifically focuses on two of the author’s works Distant Reading and The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature.

  • Issue Year: 47/2015
  • Issue No: 157
  • Page Range: 349-364
  • Page Count: 16
  • Language: Serbian