Jonathan Goodwin, John Holbo (eds.): Reading Graphs, Maps, and Trees: Responses to Franco Moretti (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · history of literature, literary criticism, literary theory, literature, reading
Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History is one of the most provocative recent works of literary history. The present volume collects generalist and specialist, academic and nonacademic responses by statisticians, philosophers, historians, literary scholars and others. And Moretti’s responses to these responses. Originally written as contributions to an online book event hosted at The Valve, and edited for this volume, these essays explore, extend and criticize many aspects of Franco Moretti’s work. They will be of interest to anyone interested in Moretti’s brand of “distant reading”; or in the prospects for quantitative approaches to literary style and genre; or recent interdisciplinary work in the humanities generally.
Contributors: Bill Benzon, Tim Burke, Jenny Davidson, Ray Davis, Jonathan Goodwin, Eric Hayot, John Holbo, Steven Berlin Johnson, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Sean McCann, Franco Moretti, Adam Roberts, Cosma Shalizi.
Publisher Parlor Press, 2011
Glassbead Books
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
ISBN 1602352054, 9781602352056
256 pages
Franco Moretti: Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models For A Literary History (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · geography, history of literature, literary criticism, literary theory, literature, reading
The “great iconoclast of literary criticism” reinvents the study of the novel.
In this groundbreaking book, Franco Moretti argues that literature scholars should stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead. In place of the traditionally selective literary canon of a few hundred texts, Moretti offers charts, maps and time lines, developing the idea of “distant reading” into a full-blown experiment in literary historiography, in which the canon disappears into the larger literary system. Charting entire genres—the epistolary, the gothic, and the historical novel—as well as the literary output of countries such as Japan, Italy, Spain, and Nigeria, he shows how literary history looks significantly different from what is commonly supposed and how the concept of aesthetic form can be radically redefined.
Afterword by Alberto Piazza
Publisher Verso, 2005
ISBN 1844670260, 9781844670260
119 pages
a series of short essays and comments on the book (The Valve)
review (Elif Batuman, n+1)
review (Kathryn Schulz, The New York Times Sunday Book Review)
Lisa Gitelman: Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (1999)
Filed under book | Tags: · history of technology, hypertext, kinetoscope, language, phonograph, reading, technology, typewriter, writing
This is a richly imaginative study of machines for writing and reading at the end of the nineteenth century in America. Its aim is to explore writing and reading as culturally contingent experiences, and at the same time to broaden our view of the relationship between technology and textuality.
At the book’s heart is the proposition that technologies of inscription are materialized theories of language. Whether they failed (like Thomas Edison’s “electric pen”) or succeeded (like typewriters), inscriptive technologies of the late nineteenth century were local, often competitive embodiments of the way people experienced writing and reading. Such a perspective cuts through the determinism of recent accounts while arguing for an interdisciplinary method for considering texts and textual production.
Starting with the cacophonous promotion of shorthand alphabets in postbellum America, the author investigates the assumptions—social, psychic, semiotic—that lie behind varying inscriptive practices. The “grooves” in the book’s title are the delicate lines recorded and played by phonographs, and readers will find in these pages a surprising and complex genealogy of the phonograph, along with new readings of the history of the typewriter and of the earliest silent films. Modern categories of authorship, representation, and readerly consumption emerge here amid the un- or sub-literary interests of patent attorneys, would-be inventors, and record producers. Modern subjectivities emerge both in ongoing social constructions of literacy and in the unruly and seemingly unrelated practices of American spiritualism, “Coon” songs, and Rube Goldberg-type romanticism.
Just as digital networks and hypertext have today made us more aware of printed books as knowledge structures, the development and dissemination of the phonograph and typewriter coincided with a transformed awareness of oral and inscribed communication. It was an awareness at once influential in the development of consumer culture, literary and artistic experiences of modernity, and the disciplinary definition of the “human” sciences, such as linguistics, anthropology, and psychology. Recorded sound, typescripts, silent films, and other inscriptive media are memory devices, and in today’s terms the author offers a critical theory of ROM and RAM for the century before computers.
Publisher Stanford University Press, 1999
ISBN 0804732701, 9780804732703
282 pages
Review (Daniel Gilfillan, RCCS, 2002)
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