Text-Free Literary Scholarship

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There was a fascinating article in the NY Times this past weekend about the scholarship of Franco Moretti, a professor of comparative literature at Stanford. He proposes a so-called "text-free" approach to studying literature, i.e. using quantitative methods to study publication data to try and get a macro-picture of literature. Here's a sample of the article:

"What a minimal fraction of the literary field we all work on," Mr. Moretti declares, tactfully including himself among the guilty. "A canon of 200 novels, for instance, sounds very large for 19th-century Britain (and is much larger than the current one), but is still less than 1 per cent of the novels that were actually published: 20,000, 30, more, no one really knows — and close reading won't help here, a novel a day every day of the year would take a century or so."

The perils of such a method, he writes, are clear: "A field this large cannot be understood by stitching together separate bits of knowledge about individual cases, because it isn't a sum of individual cases: it's a collective system, that should be grasped as such, as a whole."

― o. nate (onate), Monday, 12 January 2004 16:29 (twenty-two years ago)

So what do people think? Is this a brilliant new perspective on literature, or a crackpot theory that misses the point by a country mile?

― o. nate (onate), Monday, 12 January 2004 16:30 (twenty-two years ago)

Mr. Moretti's approach seems interesting, but I certainly don't see its relation to the subject of literature. He could be teaching the history of publishing or of pop culture, but to call him a professor of comparative literature would be, I think, like calling my PC a human brain. Mr. Moretti wants to view literature as little more than an indication of the Zeitgiest of a period--if this is true, would it not be more effective to study the non-literature, such as graffitti or advertising? Works by individual humans (or small groups of humans) make literature; their value lies not in their qualities of representation but in their exceptional qualities. We study them for this reason.

My immediate visceral response to Mr. Moretti's idea was to be insulted, both as a reader of literature and (if I play my cards right) a producer of literature. After some thought, that response hasn't changed.

― Charles Ardinger, Monday, 12 January 2004 19:00 (twenty-two years ago)

I'm gonna have to go with Harold Bloom. My impression of a lot of the scholarship that tries to torque the study of literature into alignment with the sciences is that these scholars are ashamed of the impractical qualities of literature, namely humor, emotion, anti-authoritarianism, and fun. We don't need any more professors projecting a denial of a passion for reading onto undergraduates. Fuck literature-as-sociology.

― otto, Monday, 12 January 2004 19:25 (twenty-two years ago)

i just printed the article out. thanks for the link. based on a quick skim, i'd say it's fascinating and utterly wrong-headed. i'm looking forward to giving it full attention later on today.

― lauren (laurenp), Monday, 12 January 2004 20:09 (twenty-two years ago)

ummm ... i think some of the reactions here are a little unfair.

isn't this just an aspect of the fernand braudel/Annales approach to humanities applied to literature? i am definitely sympathetic to the idea of a "total history", y'know, like looking at the lives and habits of actual peasants or the geography or farming techniques over time as opposed to your will and ariel durant and so on where at any given time three larger-than-life members of royalty are dashing across europe on horseback changing the fate of nations.

similarly, i'm all for close reading but you can't isolate novels from their historical context ... you aren't going to have a full understanding of "the victorian novel" without understanding first that the bestsellers of the time were "marriage manuals" (read: sex education). otherwise you have a similarly top-heavy "rockist" view of literature...

i suppose you could just study style but then it wouldn't be comp. lit, right?

― vahid (vahid), Monday, 12 January 2004 20:53 (twenty-two years ago)

would it not be more effective to study the non-literature, such as graffitti or advertising

bingo! that's actually what lots of comparitive literature people do.

― vahid (vahid), Monday, 12 January 2004 20:55 (twenty-two years ago)

although mr. moretti's method is of course, also incomplete. what he's doing will probably make a useful addendum to more traditional lit. theory.

impractical qualities of literature, namely humor, emotion, anti-authoritarianism, and fun

and woe betide the academic who thinks he can decide what the 17c. thought defined "humor", "anti-authoritarianism" and "fun" without a little judicious sociology ... or at least a dip into a more than a few primary sources. if people like moretti can boil it down to a rough gestalt with some statistical work more power to him, and academics who are freed then of wading through piles of primary sources to try and apprehend a gestalt ... this kind of work smashes preconceptions and received knowledge, people!

― vahid (vahid), Monday, 12 January 2004 21:00 (twenty-two years ago)

Vahid, I'm all for historians and whoever else studying texts as symptoms of contemporary gestalts. But when literary scholars abandon the texts, too, then who's left to open students up to, say, how funny (and effective) Swift's writings are? To collapse the sensibility of Gulliver's Travels or A Tale of a Tub into a matter of statistics is to do a disservice to the author and future readers. I can imagine how that may sound silly, but I think scholars who would think so are silly. The author is dead. Long live the author!

― otto, Monday, 12 January 2004 21:49 (twenty-two years ago)

yes but he's not studying swift!! swift is a microcosm. he's trying to get a macro picture of literature ... like i said, it's a field of study, not a whole new type of lit crit. i'm sure he's not trying to get his colleagues fired or anything ...

i think it would be a disservice to the readers of the past, the consumers of swift's writing in swift's time (or even swift's contemporaries who'd never heard of him, or who didn't like him and never bought a book) to not look at the statistics. do you want the musicologists of the future to ignore the pop charts?

(please new statistics/maths/numbers are soulless and evil things that i just don't understand answers)

― vahid (vahid), Monday, 12 January 2004 22:14 (twenty-two years ago)

Vahid, I appreciate what you're saying. I just get creeped out by people who make a profession of studying literature that theorize their way out of reading novels, poems, and drama, like actual lit's beneath them. The stuff needs to be read carefully and passed on to the next generation, not treated as source material for the presiding tastes in book covers in the 18th C. or whenever.

To stop being a complete ass, it is an interesting as well as an alarming idea. But having sat through long seminars supposedly devoted to literature in which everything other than the text at hand is discussed, it gives me bad theory-flashbacks.

― otto, Monday, 12 January 2004 23:01 (twenty-two years ago)

Sounds interesting enough, but I'm totally opposed to the institutionalised study of literature, so y'know, whatever.

― writingstatic (writingstatic), Monday, 12 January 2004 23:40 (twenty-two years ago)

I think Vahid made several good points on this thread. I see Moretti's brand of scholarship as a useful adjunct to - not a replacement of - existing modes of literary study. And in fact, it may help to correct some misconceptions about literary history that plague the more traditional modes of literary study. However, I also sympathize with the view that the things that make literature interesting are precisely those things that are difficult to quantify.

― o. nate (onate), Tuesday, 13 January 2004 15:52 (twenty-two years ago)

three months pass...

i wanna free scholarship in mathes

― mohamed ibrahem gamea, Tuesday, 13 April 2004 21:28 (twenty-two years ago)

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Text-Free Literary Scholarship - C or D?