The influential and controversial critic takes literary history out of the classroom and into the public
In the field of literary history and theory, Franco Moretti is synonymous with innovation. The cofounder of the Stanford Literary Lab, he brought quantitative methods into the study of the novel, enabling a “distant” reading that uses computation to analyze literary production over centuries. But at the same time, he was also teaching undergraduates the history of literature. Knowing Moretti, it’s no surprise that he didn’t teach the course the accepted way: one author after another, in a long uninterrupted chain. Instead, he put an irregular chessboard in front of his students that was too strange to be taken for granted. Literary history had become a problem, and he offered a solution.
In Far Country, Moretti take these lectures out of the classroom and lets us share in the passion and excitement that comes from radical critique. Unconstrained by genre, Moretti juxtaposes Whitman and Baudelaire, the Western and film noir, even Rembrandt and Warhol, illuminating each through their opposition. With his guidance, we revel in the process of transformation―the earthquakes that shook the “how” of artistic form―and begin to shape a new view on American culture.
Bracing in its insight and provocative in its conclusions, Far Country is a critical look at the development of American cultural hegemony.

Far Country: Scenes from American Culture

Literature & Fiction

Moretti, Franco

History & Criticism

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms

Shakespearean tragedy and Dracula, Sherlock Holmes and Ulysses, Frankenstei and The Waste Land—all are celebrated “wonders” of modern literature, whether in its mandarin or popular form. However, it is the fact that these texts are so central to our contemporary notion of literature that sometimes hinders our ability to understand them. Franco Moretti applies himself to this problem by drawing skillfully on structuralist, sociological and psycho-analytic modes of enquity in order to read these texts as literary systems which are tokens of wider cultural and political realities. In the process, Moretti offers us compelling accounts of various literary genres, explores the relationships between high and mass culture in this century, and considers the relevance of tragic, Romantic and Darwinian views of the world.

Signs taken for wonders: Essays in the sociology of literary forms

Verso Editions

Signs Taken for Wonders

Susan Fischer, David Forgacs & David Miller [trans.]

Verso

Verso Books

Wilhelm Meister, Elizabeth Bennet, Julien Sorel, Rastignac, Jane Eyre, Bazaroz, Dorothea Brooke ... the golden age of the European novel discovers a new collective protagonist: youth. It is problematic and restless youth—“strange” characters, as their own creators often say—arising from the downfall of traditional societies. But even more than that, youth is the symbolic figure for European modernity: that sudden mix of great expectations and lost illusions that the bourgeois world learns to “read”, and to accept, as if it were a novel. The Way of the World, with its unique combination of narrative theory and social history, interprets the Bildungsroman as the great cultural mediator of nineteenth-century Europe: a form which explores the many strange compromises between revolution and restoration, economic take-off and aesthetic pleasure, individual autonomy and social normality.

The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture

Shakespearean tragedy and Dracula, Sherlock Holmes and Ulysses, Frankenstei and The Waste Land—all are celebrated “wonders” of modern literature, whether in its mandarin or popular form. However, it is the fact that these texts are so central to our contemporary notion of literature that sometimes hinders our ability to understand them. Franco Moretti applies himself to this problem bydrawing skillfully on structuralist, sociological and psycho-analytic modes of enquity in order to read these texts as literary systems which are tokens of wider cultural and political realities. In the process, Moretti offers us compelling accounts of various literary genres, explores the relationships between high and mass culture in this century, and considers the relevance of tragic, Romantic and Darwinian views of the world.

About the Author\nFranco Moretti is the author ofmany books, including Graphs, Maps, Trees; The Bourgeois; and Distant Reading, winner of the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He is professor emeritus at Stanford, where he founded the Center for the Study of the Novel and the Literary Lab; writes regularly for New Left Review; and is a Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.\nThe influential and controversial critic takes literary history out of the classroom and into the public\nIn the field of literary history and theory, Franco Moretti is synonymous with innovation. The cofounder of the Stanford Literary Lab, he brought quantitative methods into the study of the novel, enabling a “distant” reading that uses computation to analyze literary production over centuries. But at the same time, he was also teaching undergraduates the history of literature. Knowing Moretti, it’s no surprise that he didn’t teach the course the accepted way: one author after another, in a long uninterrupted chain. Instead, he put an irregular chessboard in front of his students that was too strange to be taken for granted. Literary history had become a problem, and he offered a solution.\nIn Far Country, Moretti take these lectures out of the classroom and lets us share in the passion and excitement that comes from radical critique. Unconstrained by genre, Moretti juxtaposes Whitman and Baudelaire, the Western and film noir, even Rembrandt and Warhol, illuminating each through their opposition. With his guidance, we revel in the process of transformation―the earthquakes that shook the “how” of artistic form―and begin to shape a new view on American culture.\nBracing in its insight and provocative in its conclusions, Far Country is a critical look at the development of American cultural hegemony.

Picador

Distant Reading

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD How does a literary historian end up thinking in terms of z-scores, principal component analysis, and clustering coefficients? The essays in Distant Reading led to a new and often contested paradigm of literary analysis. In presenting them here Franco Moretti reconstructs his intellectual trajectory, the theoretical influences over his work, and explores the polemics that have often developed around his positions. From the evolutionary model of “Modern European Literature,” through the geo-cultural insights of “Conjectures of World Literature” and “Planet Hollywood,” to the quantitative findings of “Style, inc.” and the abstract patterns of “Network Theory, Plot Analysis,” the book follows two decades of conceptual development, organizing them around the metaphor of “distant reading,” that has come to define—well beyond the wildest expectations of its author—a growing field of unorthodox literary studies.

Reference

"I am a member of the bourgeois class, feel myself to be such, and have been brought up on its opinions and ideals," wrote Max Weber, in 1895. Who could repeat these words today? Thus begins Franco Moretti’s study of the bourgeois in modern European literature, where a gallery of individual portraits is entwined around the analysis of specific keywords – such as ‘useful’ and ‘earnest’, ‘efficiency’, ‘influence’, ‘comfort’, ‘roba’ – and of the formal mutations of the medium of prose. The book charts the rise and fall of bourgeois culture, exploring the causes for its historical weakness, and searches for the seeds of its failures.

The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature

How does a literary historian end up thinking in terms of z-scores, principal component analysis, and clustering coefficients? The essays in Distant Reading led to a new and often contested paradigm of literary analysis. In presenting them here Franco Moretti reconstructs his intellectual trajectory, the theoretical influences over his work, and explores the polemics that have often developed around his positions.From the evolutionary model of “Modern European Literature,” through the geo-cultural insights of “Conjectures of World Literature” and “Planet Hollywood,” to the quantitative findings of “Style, inc.” and the abstract patterns of “Network Theory, Plot Analysis,” the book follows two decades of conceptual development, organizing them around the metaphor of “distant reading,” that has come to define—well beyond the wildest expectations of its author—a growing field of unorthodox literary studies.

Essays & Correspondence

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Moretti, Franco. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Moretti, Franco

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Moretti, Franco. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Far Country: Scenes from American Culture

Signs taken for wonders: Essays in the sociology of literary forms

Signs Taken for Wonders

Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms

The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture

Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms

Far Country: Scenes from American Culture

Distant Reading

The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature

Distant Reading