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nickfourtimes's review against another edition
5.0
1) "The title of this short book deserves a few words of explanation. To begin with, this is an essay on literary history: literature, the old territory (more or less), unlike the drift towards other discourses so typical of recent years. But within that old territory, a new object of study: instead of concrete, individual works, a trio of artificial constructs---graphs, maps, and trees---in which the reality of the text undergoes a process of deliberate reduction and abstraction. 'Distant reading', I have once called this type of approach; where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models."
2) "History was... Pomian speaks in the past tense here, as is probably accurate in the case of social history, but certainly not for its literary counterpart, where the collector of rare and curious works, that do not repeat themselves, exceptional---and which close reading makes even more exceptional, by emphasizing the uniqueness of exactly this word and this sentence here---is still by far the dominant figure. But what would happen if literary historians, too, decided to 'shift their gaze' (Pomian again) 'from the extraordinary to the everyday, from exceptional to the large mass of facts'? What literature would we find, in 'the large mass of facts'?"
3) "Variations in a conflict that remains constant: this is what emerges at the level of the cycle---and if the conflict remains constant, then the point is not who prevails in this or that skirmish, but exactly the opposite: no victory is ever definitive, neither men nor women writers 'occupy' the British novel once and for all, and the form keeps oscillating back and forth between the two groups. And if this sounds like nothing is happening, no, what is happening is the oscillation, which allows the novel to use a double pool of talents and forms, thereby boosting its productivity, and giving it an edge over its many competitors. But this process can only be glimpsed at the level of the cycle: individual episodes tend, if anything, to conceal it, and only the abstract pattern reveals the true nature of the historical process."
4) "[The] key to this perceptual shift lies in Mitford's most typical episode: the country walk. In story after story, the young narrator leaves the village, each time in a different direction, reaches the destinations charted in figure 14, then turns around and goes home. 'When a system is free to spread its energy in space', writes Rudolf Arnheim, 'it sends out its vectors evenly all around, like the rays emanating from a source of light. The resulting... pattern is the prototype of centric composition.' Exactly: out of the free movements of Our Village's narrator, spread evenly all around like the petals of a daisy, a circular pattern crystalizes---as it does, we shall see, in all village stories, of which it represents the fundamental chronotype. But in order to see this pattern, we must first extract it from the narrative flow, and the only way to do so is with a map. Not, of course, that the map is already an explanation; but at least it shows us that there is something that needs to be explained. One step at a time.
[...]
In Mitford's walks, Barrells' 'rough circle... in which the villagers work and move' is rewritten as a space of leisure rather than work. Slow easy strolls, thoughtless, happy, in the company of a greyhound called May; all around, a countryside full of picturesque natural views, but where very few people are actually doing anything. Decorative: for each page devoted to agricultural labour, there must be twenty on flowers and trees, described with meticulous precision. If urban readers are made to share the village's perception of space, then, it's also true that this space has been thoroughly gentrified; as if Mitford had travelled forward in time, and discovered what city-dwellers will want to find in the countryside during a brief weekend visit. Not surprisingly, country walks were by far the most popular part of Our Village, and remained long in print by themselves while the rest was forgotten."
5) "The very small, and the very large; these are the forces that shape literary history. Devices and genres; not texts. Texts are certainly the real objects of literature (in the Strand Magazine you don't find 'clues' or 'detective fiction', you find Sherlock Holmes, or Hilda Wade, or The Adventures of a Man of Science); but they are not the right objects of knowledge for literary history. Take the concept of genre: usually, literary criticism approaches it in terms of what Ernst Mayr calls 'typological thinking': we choose a 'representative individual', and through it define the genre as a whole. Sherlock Holmes, say, and detective fiction; Wilhelm Meister and the Bildungsroman; you analyse Goethe's novel, and it counts as an analysis of the entire genre, because for typological thinking there is really no gap between the real object and the object of knowledge. But once a genre is visualised as a tree, the continuity between the two inevitably disappears: the genre becomes an abstract 'diversity spectrum' (Mayr again), whose internal multiplicity no individual text will ever be able to represent. And so, even 'A Scandal in Bohemia' becomes just one leaf among many: delightful, of course---but no longer entitled to stand for the genre as a whole."
6) "From the abode of noise and impropriety, where nobody was in their right place, to the asshole gringos handing him bullshit about sovereignty, democracy, and human rights. This is what comparative literature could be, if it took itself seriously as world literature, on the one hand, and as comparative morphology, on the other. Take a form, follow it from space to space, and study the reasons for its transformations: the 'opportunistic, hence unpredictable' reasons of evolution, in Ernst Mayr's words. And of course the multiplicity of spaces is the great challenge, and the curse, almost, of comparative literature: but it is also its peculiar strength, because it is only in such a wide, non-homogeneous geography that some fundamental principles of cultural history become manifest. As, here, the dependence of morphological novelty on spacial discontinuity: 'allopatric speciation', to quote Ernst Mayr one more time: a new species (or at any rate a new formal arrangement), arising when a population migrates into a new homeland, and must quickly change in order to survive. Just like free indirect style when it moves into Petersberg, Aci Trezza, Dublin, Ciudad Trujillo..."
2) "History was... Pomian speaks in the past tense here, as is probably accurate in the case of social history, but certainly not for its literary counterpart, where the collector of rare and curious works, that do not repeat themselves, exceptional---and which close reading makes even more exceptional, by emphasizing the uniqueness of exactly this word and this sentence here---is still by far the dominant figure. But what would happen if literary historians, too, decided to 'shift their gaze' (Pomian again) 'from the extraordinary to the everyday, from exceptional to the large mass of facts'? What literature would we find, in 'the large mass of facts'?"
3) "Variations in a conflict that remains constant: this is what emerges at the level of the cycle---and if the conflict remains constant, then the point is not who prevails in this or that skirmish, but exactly the opposite: no victory is ever definitive, neither men nor women writers 'occupy' the British novel once and for all, and the form keeps oscillating back and forth between the two groups. And if this sounds like nothing is happening, no, what is happening is the oscillation, which allows the novel to use a double pool of talents and forms, thereby boosting its productivity, and giving it an edge over its many competitors. But this process can only be glimpsed at the level of the cycle: individual episodes tend, if anything, to conceal it, and only the abstract pattern reveals the true nature of the historical process."
4) "[The] key to this perceptual shift lies in Mitford's most typical episode: the country walk. In story after story, the young narrator leaves the village, each time in a different direction, reaches the destinations charted in figure 14, then turns around and goes home. 'When a system is free to spread its energy in space', writes Rudolf Arnheim, 'it sends out its vectors evenly all around, like the rays emanating from a source of light. The resulting... pattern is the prototype of centric composition.' Exactly: out of the free movements of Our Village's narrator, spread evenly all around like the petals of a daisy, a circular pattern crystalizes---as it does, we shall see, in all village stories, of which it represents the fundamental chronotype. But in order to see this pattern, we must first extract it from the narrative flow, and the only way to do so is with a map. Not, of course, that the map is already an explanation; but at least it shows us that there is something that needs to be explained. One step at a time.
[...]
In Mitford's walks, Barrells' 'rough circle... in which the villagers work and move' is rewritten as a space of leisure rather than work. Slow easy strolls, thoughtless, happy, in the company of a greyhound called May; all around, a countryside full of picturesque natural views, but where very few people are actually doing anything. Decorative: for each page devoted to agricultural labour, there must be twenty on flowers and trees, described with meticulous precision. If urban readers are made to share the village's perception of space, then, it's also true that this space has been thoroughly gentrified; as if Mitford had travelled forward in time, and discovered what city-dwellers will want to find in the countryside during a brief weekend visit. Not surprisingly, country walks were by far the most popular part of Our Village, and remained long in print by themselves while the rest was forgotten."
5) "The very small, and the very large; these are the forces that shape literary history. Devices and genres; not texts. Texts are certainly the real objects of literature (in the Strand Magazine you don't find 'clues' or 'detective fiction', you find Sherlock Holmes, or Hilda Wade, or The Adventures of a Man of Science); but they are not the right objects of knowledge for literary history. Take the concept of genre: usually, literary criticism approaches it in terms of what Ernst Mayr calls 'typological thinking': we choose a 'representative individual', and through it define the genre as a whole. Sherlock Holmes, say, and detective fiction; Wilhelm Meister and the Bildungsroman; you analyse Goethe's novel, and it counts as an analysis of the entire genre, because for typological thinking there is really no gap between the real object and the object of knowledge. But once a genre is visualised as a tree, the continuity between the two inevitably disappears: the genre becomes an abstract 'diversity spectrum' (Mayr again), whose internal multiplicity no individual text will ever be able to represent. And so, even 'A Scandal in Bohemia' becomes just one leaf among many: delightful, of course---but no longer entitled to stand for the genre as a whole."
6) "From the abode of noise and impropriety, where nobody was in their right place, to the asshole gringos handing him bullshit about sovereignty, democracy, and human rights. This is what comparative literature could be, if it took itself seriously as world literature, on the one hand, and as comparative morphology, on the other. Take a form, follow it from space to space, and study the reasons for its transformations: the 'opportunistic, hence unpredictable' reasons of evolution, in Ernst Mayr's words. And of course the multiplicity of spaces is the great challenge, and the curse, almost, of comparative literature: but it is also its peculiar strength, because it is only in such a wide, non-homogeneous geography that some fundamental principles of cultural history become manifest. As, here, the dependence of morphological novelty on spacial discontinuity: 'allopatric speciation', to quote Ernst Mayr one more time: a new species (or at any rate a new formal arrangement), arising when a population migrates into a new homeland, and must quickly change in order to survive. Just like free indirect style when it moves into Petersberg, Aci Trezza, Dublin, Ciudad Trujillo..."
alexander0's review against another edition
3.0
As an opening statement: This is a book for someone who is coming from an area of literary criticism, history, rhetoric, or similar. This book is not meant for someone who is pretty well versed in quantitative social science/information methods. The reason I start here is that if your expectation is that this is going to teach you methods for literary work, you would be wrong. This is an argument to a field that largely dismisses quantitative methods. Anyone who is educated on quantitative methods will see this book as fairly obviously clear.
That said, this book does a good job of putting together some excellent references and cases to argue why literary fields could borrow methods from other more quantitative and mixed methods fields by using references within and important to literary criticism.
Also, it makes for a nice checkpoint for someone who is wanting to work relative to these fields, already knows the methods, but doesn't know the typical methods of literary and rhetorical fields.
That said, this book does a good job of putting together some excellent references and cases to argue why literary fields could borrow methods from other more quantitative and mixed methods fields by using references within and important to literary criticism.
Also, it makes for a nice checkpoint for someone who is wanting to work relative to these fields, already knows the methods, but doesn't know the typical methods of literary and rhetorical fields.
marcatili's review against another edition
4.0
An interesting and important take on literary history, this book really puts into context the genesis of literary genres and poses thoughts on the realities around which books 'make it' and which don't. This book is valuable because it de-centralises the commonly held canon and gives some insight to the reality of the literary industry.
rsosolen's review
4.0
Close Reading vs Distant Reading
The above thought has been drifting around my mind since I started my degree. What do the two terms mean to literary analysis? Is one better than the other? Why are so many people angry about this new idea of ‘Distant Reading’.
Distant Reading is a term coined by Italian literary scholar Franco Moretti. He strives to analyze literature by more scientific means. In the opening pages of his book Graph, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History he states that the traditional way of looking at literary history is extremely limited, and as scholars we should broaden our horizons by adapting techniques used in natural and social sciences. His term ‘distant reading’ suggests instead of carefully looking at one particular text to gleam deeper meaning scholars should collect and analyze texts on a massive scale. It is a type of big data analytic for literature. There is no way we can read each and every book that has ever been published, so why not look at books on a larger scale. Why don’t we look at them as data instead of individual pieces of writing. Moretti suggests this will show us so much more about the history of literature than close reading ever could.
What is so wrong with close reading?
As a former English major I know the art of close reading well. You take one, or a couple, pieces of literature from a time and place and you carefully analyze every detail out of if until you understand its meaning and place in historical time. There can be great depth in close reading, but it does have its limits. Every first year English student will read ‘Tyger’ and ‘The Lamb’ by William Blake, but they will not get to read ‘Ah! Sunflower’. They will read ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’ by John Keats, but not ‘ When I have fears that I may cease to be’. There is an art to literary study that is beautiful, but chooses what we read and what we don’t read? What if we are missing out on some over looked treasure that slipped through the academic cracks? Maybe close reading is too narrow and too over done that we are missing out on so much more that we can’t see in literary history.
Is distant reading better then?
From what I have read so far by Moretti, along with two articles about his work, I think that distant reading is not necessarily better than close reading–though he would have a different opinion. In his graphs for tracking genres it is interesting how there is a pattern of what is popular when and for how long, and again in male vs female authors there is a variation of which sex dominates writing at any given time. These graphs open up new questions to ask why this is happening, and inspire the further investigation to why–but this is when a distant reading needs to become a bit closer. For me there needs to be more than just data. As I briefly mentioned earlier, there is art in literary history and science tends to be the opposite of art. By taking an entire history of literature and turning it into computer data to by analyzed you are pulling away from the depth and meaning that a close reading can give you. In the New York Times article ‘An Attempt to Discover the Laws of Literature’, by Joshua Rothman, he states that Moretti is looking at literature the way an astronaut is looking at Earth from Mars–too far away to really understand all the details. But for Moretti “Knowing is not reading” and Rothman concludes his article by stating that the majority will continue to enjoy our reading while Moretti is up on Mars discovering new things. I don’t agree with Rothman’s idea of just leaving the literary astronaut alone with his crazy ideas. Why not listen to them? Why not give the distant reading idea a real try. Maybe this cold science has some warmth and colour to it? We might learn something new, and is that not why we became students and scholars in the first place?
It is very interesting to see literary history from a wider angle, and I can see how this can improve scholarly research, but I don’t think we should just throw away the practice of close reading. I think that this is not a case of one versus the other, but of one and the other. How can distant reading improve research in literary history? How can close reading compliment distant reading? If we all do our parts as universal learners and keep our minds open and hungry maybe we will actually learn something new. And how bad could that be?
I have to admit I found the last two chapters hard to unpack. I have never thought of literature from the angel Moretti is addressing it. The main reason I was able to engage with the first chapter was because I could wrap my head easily around the notion of distant reading. I can see how it could reveal new aspects of the history of literature we have not see before, and I stand by my opinion that it is a good companion–not replacement–to close reading. I suppose some of my confusion is wrapped up in how the next two chapters seem to be more alike closer reading than distant reading.
Let me attempt to explain.
In the chapter about Maps, Moretti looks at a couple series of stories. One in particular is Our Village, by Mary Mitford, which is a short series of stories that focus on a narrator who lives in a small village published in the mid 1800s. I have always found it hard to read a literary critic of a book I have not read. I feel like a blind person is explaining to me what an elephant looks like, and I have never seen an elephant to know if what is being explained is entirely whole–or true. This was the first problem with my intellectual limits with this chapter. I also found it hard to understand his maps, or diagrams. I have never seen most of these diagrams before and therefore have a very untrained eye. When switching between trying to follow his thoughts, to trying to decode the diagrams, I felt a bit lost. Since this is all new to me I will have to take it upon myself to research further, listen carefully, and maybe learn a thing or two–is that not why one goes to school?
I think I may also have been a bit disheartened by Moretti’s take on a literary map. As a visual person, and as one who enjoys to create visual pieces of art from time to time, I was a bit underwhelmed by his diagrams. At the same time I was reading an article for another class called “Creating a Landscape of Memory: The Potential of the Humanities GIS”, by David Bodenhammer. In this article he explains the idea of deep mapping, a post-modern technique of creating a multi-leveled memory map. Bodenhammer puts forth the suggestion that Humanists should use GIS like a deep map and create mutli-media, multilevel, complex innovative maps of literature and the like. The ideas that floated around my head were full of lights, bells, and colours. Then I looked at Moretti’s diagram maps and I felt slightly cheated. I like the idea of looking at the space created in a piece of literature, but I think Moretti’s approach lacks the breath that makes literature show engaging.
The art of it.
Then I read the chapter on Trees, and I was even more confused. I thought Moretti was against the idea of close reading, but the entire chapter is a series of close readings in an attempt to create a tree diagram that tackles the evolution of literary style– he focuses mainly on free indirect style. It is in this chapter he seems to be more connected to the romance, the pulse of the artistic life of literature. He opens the chapter with an introduction and close reading of Darwin’s tree on divergence of character in his theory of evolution and tries to create trees for literature. I have little to no experience in reading trees, so I lack the proper background to state if these diagrams are successful or not, but I think my confusions and musings come to a good conclusion.
Bare with me.
Moretti is suggesting we view literary history from a perspective we are not used to. He is very blunt, and slightly stubborn, with his ideas on how and why this is. Though I am still trying to understand parts of his book, and some parts I do understand I do not wholly agree with, I do agree with his overall thesis.
We need to change the way we look at literature in order to learn something new.
The above thought has been drifting around my mind since I started my degree. What do the two terms mean to literary analysis? Is one better than the other? Why are so many people angry about this new idea of ‘Distant Reading’.
Distant Reading is a term coined by Italian literary scholar Franco Moretti. He strives to analyze literature by more scientific means. In the opening pages of his book Graph, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History he states that the traditional way of looking at literary history is extremely limited, and as scholars we should broaden our horizons by adapting techniques used in natural and social sciences. His term ‘distant reading’ suggests instead of carefully looking at one particular text to gleam deeper meaning scholars should collect and analyze texts on a massive scale. It is a type of big data analytic for literature. There is no way we can read each and every book that has ever been published, so why not look at books on a larger scale. Why don’t we look at them as data instead of individual pieces of writing. Moretti suggests this will show us so much more about the history of literature than close reading ever could.
What is so wrong with close reading?
As a former English major I know the art of close reading well. You take one, or a couple, pieces of literature from a time and place and you carefully analyze every detail out of if until you understand its meaning and place in historical time. There can be great depth in close reading, but it does have its limits. Every first year English student will read ‘Tyger’ and ‘The Lamb’ by William Blake, but they will not get to read ‘Ah! Sunflower’. They will read ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’ by John Keats, but not ‘ When I have fears that I may cease to be’. There is an art to literary study that is beautiful, but chooses what we read and what we don’t read? What if we are missing out on some over looked treasure that slipped through the academic cracks? Maybe close reading is too narrow and too over done that we are missing out on so much more that we can’t see in literary history.
Is distant reading better then?
From what I have read so far by Moretti, along with two articles about his work, I think that distant reading is not necessarily better than close reading–though he would have a different opinion. In his graphs for tracking genres it is interesting how there is a pattern of what is popular when and for how long, and again in male vs female authors there is a variation of which sex dominates writing at any given time. These graphs open up new questions to ask why this is happening, and inspire the further investigation to why–but this is when a distant reading needs to become a bit closer. For me there needs to be more than just data. As I briefly mentioned earlier, there is art in literary history and science tends to be the opposite of art. By taking an entire history of literature and turning it into computer data to by analyzed you are pulling away from the depth and meaning that a close reading can give you. In the New York Times article ‘An Attempt to Discover the Laws of Literature’, by Joshua Rothman, he states that Moretti is looking at literature the way an astronaut is looking at Earth from Mars–too far away to really understand all the details. But for Moretti “Knowing is not reading” and Rothman concludes his article by stating that the majority will continue to enjoy our reading while Moretti is up on Mars discovering new things. I don’t agree with Rothman’s idea of just leaving the literary astronaut alone with his crazy ideas. Why not listen to them? Why not give the distant reading idea a real try. Maybe this cold science has some warmth and colour to it? We might learn something new, and is that not why we became students and scholars in the first place?
It is very interesting to see literary history from a wider angle, and I can see how this can improve scholarly research, but I don’t think we should just throw away the practice of close reading. I think that this is not a case of one versus the other, but of one and the other. How can distant reading improve research in literary history? How can close reading compliment distant reading? If we all do our parts as universal learners and keep our minds open and hungry maybe we will actually learn something new. And how bad could that be?
I have to admit I found the last two chapters hard to unpack. I have never thought of literature from the angel Moretti is addressing it. The main reason I was able to engage with the first chapter was because I could wrap my head easily around the notion of distant reading. I can see how it could reveal new aspects of the history of literature we have not see before, and I stand by my opinion that it is a good companion–not replacement–to close reading. I suppose some of my confusion is wrapped up in how the next two chapters seem to be more alike closer reading than distant reading.
Let me attempt to explain.
In the chapter about Maps, Moretti looks at a couple series of stories. One in particular is Our Village, by Mary Mitford, which is a short series of stories that focus on a narrator who lives in a small village published in the mid 1800s. I have always found it hard to read a literary critic of a book I have not read. I feel like a blind person is explaining to me what an elephant looks like, and I have never seen an elephant to know if what is being explained is entirely whole–or true. This was the first problem with my intellectual limits with this chapter. I also found it hard to understand his maps, or diagrams. I have never seen most of these diagrams before and therefore have a very untrained eye. When switching between trying to follow his thoughts, to trying to decode the diagrams, I felt a bit lost. Since this is all new to me I will have to take it upon myself to research further, listen carefully, and maybe learn a thing or two–is that not why one goes to school?
I think I may also have been a bit disheartened by Moretti’s take on a literary map. As a visual person, and as one who enjoys to create visual pieces of art from time to time, I was a bit underwhelmed by his diagrams. At the same time I was reading an article for another class called “Creating a Landscape of Memory: The Potential of the Humanities GIS”, by David Bodenhammer. In this article he explains the idea of deep mapping, a post-modern technique of creating a multi-leveled memory map. Bodenhammer puts forth the suggestion that Humanists should use GIS like a deep map and create mutli-media, multilevel, complex innovative maps of literature and the like. The ideas that floated around my head were full of lights, bells, and colours. Then I looked at Moretti’s diagram maps and I felt slightly cheated. I like the idea of looking at the space created in a piece of literature, but I think Moretti’s approach lacks the breath that makes literature show engaging.
The art of it.
Then I read the chapter on Trees, and I was even more confused. I thought Moretti was against the idea of close reading, but the entire chapter is a series of close readings in an attempt to create a tree diagram that tackles the evolution of literary style– he focuses mainly on free indirect style. It is in this chapter he seems to be more connected to the romance, the pulse of the artistic life of literature. He opens the chapter with an introduction and close reading of Darwin’s tree on divergence of character in his theory of evolution and tries to create trees for literature. I have little to no experience in reading trees, so I lack the proper background to state if these diagrams are successful or not, but I think my confusions and musings come to a good conclusion.
Bare with me.
Moretti is suggesting we view literary history from a perspective we are not used to. He is very blunt, and slightly stubborn, with his ideas on how and why this is. Though I am still trying to understand parts of his book, and some parts I do understand I do not wholly agree with, I do agree with his overall thesis.
We need to change the way we look at literature in order to learn something new.
emdub's review
5.0
R(evolutionary) reconceptualization of the work and focus of literary studies and criticism. Absolutely amazing.