Graphs, Maps, Trees
Abstract Models for a Literary History
Description:... Stanford Professor 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 luster to a tired field, one that in some respects, he says, is among the most backwards disciplines in the academy. Literary study, he argues, has been random and unsystematic. For any given periods 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. Professor Moretti offers bar charts, maps and time lines instead. His is a history of literature as data points. Charting not only the 18th-century British novel but entire genres - the epistolary, the gothic and the historical novel - as well as the literary output of countries like Japan, Italy, Spain and Nigeria, he shows literary history looks significantly different from what is commonly supposed.
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