Studying Literature by the Numbers

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Saturday, January 10, 2004
Studying Literature by the Numbers
By EMILY EAKIN
 
If Franco Moretti had his way, literature scholars
would stop reading books and start counting, graphing
and mapping them instead. For an English professor,
this is an ambition verging on apostasy. But Mr.
Moretti, a professor of English and comparative
literature at Stanford and director of the
university's center for the study of the novel,
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."


Mr. Moretti, 53, has been honing his vision of a
text-free literary scholarship in books and articles
over the last two decades. And now he is issuing a
manifesto. "Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for
Literary History," which just appeared in the
November/December issue of New Left Review, a British
journal of politics and culture, is merely the first
installment. (Two more will follow in subsequent
issues.) But in it Mr. Moretti makes his most forceful
case yet for his approach, a heretical blend of
quantitative history, geography and evolutionary
theory. 

Literary study, he argues, has been a random,
unsystematic affair. For any given period, 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 literary history to pass for the
total picture.

"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." 

Equally clear, he maintains, is the remedy: the way to
"a more rational literary history" is to replace close
reading with abstract models borrowed from the
sciences.

Where other scholars quote from "Pamela," "Moll
Flanders" or "Tom Jones" — traditionally considered
among the first modern novels — Mr. Moretti offers bar
charts, maps and time lines instead. A vast synthesis
of material (much of it gathered by other scholars
working on a single period or genre), his is a history
of literature as data points, one that looks as if it
could have been lifted from an economics textbook. 

Here the 18th-century British novel is represented by
its publication rate: a single, undulating fever line.
Likewise entire genres — including the epistolary, the
gothic and the historical novel — as well the literary
outputs of countries like Japan, Italy, Spain and
Nigeria.

Viewed from this level of abstraction, Mr. Moretti
argues, literary history looks significantly different
from what is commonly supposed. For example, it is
clear, he writes, that the novel did not experience a
single "rise," as is frequently taught (following the
title of a famous book by the critic Ian Watt), but
went through repeated cycles of growth and
retrenchment, with political crises corresponding to
dips in publication rates. So, too, according to
another graph, did the ratio of male to female
authors. 

As Mr. Moretti sums up the point: "It's fascinating to
see how researchers are convinced that they are all
describing something unique (the gender shift, the
elevation of the novel, the gentrification, the
invention of high and low, the feminization, the
sentimental education, the invasion . . . ), whereas
in all likelihood they are all observing the same
comet that keeps crossing and recrossing the sky: the
same literary cycle." 

In some ways, Mr. Moretti's quantitative method is
simply the latest in a long line of efforts to make
literary criticism look more like science. From
Russian formalism in the 1920's to New Criticism in
the 1950's and structuralism and semiotics in the
1960's and 70's, the discipline's major movements
share a desire to portray literature as a system
governed by hidden laws and structures whose
operations it is the critic's job to reveal. But in
its formal renunciation of individual texts — and,
more provocatively, of reading — Mr. Moretti's
approach, at least as he sketches it in New Left
Review, is conceivably more radical than anything his
predecessors dreamed up.

Which doesn't mean that he always knows what to make
of his findings. For example, disparate novelistic
genres, when mapped out together across a time line,
appear to share some intriguing features: an
individual life span of about 25 to 30 years and a
tendency to emerge and die out in clusters. Thirty
years is the length of a human generation, Mr. Moretti
notes. But then, he concedes, people are born — and
generations begun — every day. So what explains the
regularity with which genres appear and disappear? Mr.
Moretti isn't sure. But it is precisely this kind of
question, he argues, that scholars have overlooked by
focusing on specific texts rather than literature as a
whole. 

As he put it in a telephone interview from Rome, where
he was on vacation: "The big picture is not just
bigger in terms of the number of texts. The system is
literally a system with different properties than
individual texts. This is something literary studies
would never face if we just kept reading and rereading
the same texts." 

Maybe so. But given the extent to which instruction,
research and reputations in the field are yoked to
just that activity, even Mr. Moretti's admirers say
his approach is unlikely to win many converts. "It's
an extraordinarily brave and promising project that
carries the danger of taking the study of literature
away from reading, which is what keeps us and our
students going," said Jonathan Arac, the chairman of
the English department at Columbia University and a
specialist in the 19th- and 20th-century novel.

Harold Bloom, the Yale English professor famous for
his prodigious command of canonical literature, was
more dismissive. Interrupting a description of the
theory, he pronounced Mr. Moretti "an absurdity."

"I am interested in reading," he said with an audible
shudder. "That's all I'm interested in." 

Mr. Moretti cheerfully acknowledged that his ideas
were controversial. But that has not dampened his
enthusiasm. "After Christmas, I'm going to teach a
class on electronic data in which we will work on
8,000 titles from the mid-18th century to the 19th
century," he said, eagerly elaborating his vision of
what he called "literature without texts." 

"My little dream," he added wistfully, "is of a
literary class that would look more like a lab than a
Platonic academy." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/10/books/10LIT.html

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