Franco Moretti

Franco Moretti teaches English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Signs Taken for Wonders, The Way of the World and Modern Epic, all from Verso.

Blog

Hamlet in the machine—Franco Moretti's distant reading in the New York Times

Finally, a solution for bibliophiles drowning under the weight of their own book purchases: don't read those voluminous tomes, feed them into a computer and make graphs instead! Heresy? This, according to literary scholar cum-statistician Franco Moretti, is the only way to grasp the immensity of world literature. William Gladstone claimed that one could read 22,000 books in a lifetime. But who has the time or shelf space? Luckily Moretti's Stanford Literary Lab is designed to solve such burning bookish anxieties. The New York Times had the following to say about Moretti's literary rebellions:

As its name suggests, the Lit Lab tackles literary problems by scientific means: hypothesis-testing, computational modeling, quantitative analysis. Similar efforts are currently proliferating under the broad rubric of "digital humanities," but Moretti's approach is among the more radical. He advocates what he terms "distant reading": understanding literature not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data.

Continue Reading

Books

  • 9781844671854-frontcover

    Graphs, Maps, Trees

    The “great iconoclast of literary criticism” reinvents the study of the novel.

  • 9781844670567-frontcover

    Signs Taken for Wonders

    A compelling account of the relations between high and mass culture, across various genres.

  • 9781859842980-frontcover

    The Way of the World

    “Short, brilliant, provocative and often entertainingly upbeat.”—New Society