This document summarizes the work and ideas of Franco Moretti, a literary theorist known for his use of distant reading methods. It provides an overview of his major publications and ideas over his career, including using computational analysis and data to analyze large corpuses of literature and understand broader patterns and trends. The document also discusses some of the debates around distant reading and digital humanities approaches to literature.

1. How distant is “distant reading”?

2. Unorthodox Literary Studies?

3. Table of Content
• Modern European Literature: A Geographical Sketch (1994)
• Conjectures on World Literature (2000)
• The Slaughterhouse of Literature (2000)
• Planet Hollywood (2001)
• More Conjectures (2003)
• Evolution, World Systems, Weltliteratur (2005)
• The End of the Beginning: A Reply to Christopher
Prendergast (2006)
• The Novel: History and Theory (2008)
• Style, Inc.: Reflections on 7000 titles (2009)
• Network Theory, Plot Analysis (2011)

4. Moretti’s Beginnings
• Interpretazioni di Eliot (1975)
• Letteratura e ideologie negli anni
Trenta inglesi (1976)
• Signs taken for wonders (1983)
• Il romanzo di formazione (1986)
• Opere mondo (1994)
• Atlante del romano Europeo
(1997)
• Il romanzo (2001)
• Graphs, maps, trees (2005)
• La cultura del romanzo (2008)
• The Bourgeois (2013)
Moretti is in many respects an
old-fashioned historian of
literature who has not entirely
given up on the 1970s search
to create a happy union
between materialist and
formalist approaches to
literature […]
(M. Caesar, Franco Moretti and
the World Literature Debate,
2007)

5. What is Distant Reading?
That fatal formula had been a
late addition to the paper, where
it was initially specified, in an
allusion to the basic procedure of
quantitative history, by the words
'serial reading'. Then, somehow,
'serial' disappeared and 'distant'
remained. Partly, it was meant as
a joke; a moment of relief in a
rather relentless argument. But
no one seems to have taken it as
a joke, and they were probably
right.
Distant reading: where distance,
let me repeat it, is a condition of
knowledge: it allows you to focus
on units that are much smaller or
much larger than the text:
devices, themes, tropes—or
genres and systems. And if,
between the very small and the
very large, the text itself
disappears, well, it is one of those
cases when one can justifiably
say, Less is more. If we want to
understand the system in its
entirety, we must accept losing
something.

6. Modern European Literature
“My total reliance on the canon of European
masterpieces (as a colleague pointed out, the
word ‘great’ seemed ubiquitous in the essay;
and it was, I used it fifty-one times!) […] As the
years went by, I would move increasingly away
from this idea of literature as a collection of
masterpieces; and in truth, I feel no nostalgia for
what it meant.” (Moretti 2013)

7. An happy essay
This was an happy essay. Aimed at a non-academic
audience, and on such a large topic, it asked for a balance
between the abstraction of model-building and the
vividness of individual examples – a scene, a character, a
line of verse – that would make it worth reading in the
first place.
This was an happy essay. Evolution, geography and
formalism- the three approaches that would define my
work for over a decade – first came into systematic
contact while writing these pages. I felt curious, full of
energy; I kept studying, adding, correcting. I learned a
lot, […]

8. European Literature
Nineteenth Century
Each problem stimulates a
technical device, which
retroacts upon it in an attempt
to solve or at least contain it.
[…] And yet, in a beautiful
instance of the heterogenesis
of aims, in doing so the
European novel invents an
infinity of new stories that […]
project readers into the future
Twentieth Century
A continent that falls in love
with Milan Kundera deserves
to end like Atlantis. There is
not much more to say, the
conditions which have granted
European literature his
greatness have run their
course, and only a miracle
could reverse the trend.

9. The meaning of literature
The book thus follows literature from its
instauration in the seventeenth century to a
term in mid-nineteenth-century Romantic
aesthetic analysis. It suggests that since then
literature —in respect of any active social role—
has suffered from a kind of repetitive inertia, as
it has also been changing its meaning and
cultural role. (Reiss 1992)

10. The rise and fall of Literature
• Literature in the modern sense emerged in the
sixteenth-seventeenth century, from within an
analytico-referential framework, based in its turn on
mathematical thinking.
• The analytico-referential framework became unstable
in the second half of the nineteenth century: Frege and
the problem of the foundation of arithmetics,
mathematical logic etc.
• Hence, literature itself became unstable: avantgarde,
theory of literature, formalism and the scientific notion
of literariness, Easthope's “from literary to cultural
studies” etc.

11. Vittorini on Cybernetics
Man tries to get rid of his animal and
mechanical side, transfering it to the machine
However, technology has also a liberating aspect
that tends to transform the machine in an
universal machine on which he can ditch in its
entirety the “naturalità” (materiality), even in
the case of memory) – cybernetics, machine“a
controllo numerico” (controlled by number),
automation ecc.

12. DH and Nineteenth Century
• Stylometry, that is to say the use of statistical methods to
investigate literary style (and other things as well, to be fair), was
already practiced in North America at the end of the nineteenth
century (Mendenhall, Sherman)
• The term was invented by a Polish philosopher, Lutoslawsky, who
wanted to establish the chronology of Plato's dialogues.
• C.S. Peirce, a seminal figure in modern semiotics, dismissed the use
of statistics in authorship attribution and similar things, after a
careful reading of Lutoslawsky's book.
• Henry James ironically mention this methodologies in his fiction.
The Figure in the Carpet, a “fable for critics”, is particularly
interesting in this regard.
• Nineteenth century is a privileged period for digital literary
scholarship.

13. Warnings
• the risk that digital methods are not as
progressive as they look, and might even be
conservative, in spite of the hype surrounding
them
• the importance of epistemological issues
inscribed in the methodologies and in the
data, very dangerous because of the assumed
scientificity of the process

14. Thank You!
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• @giorgioguzzetta
• Blog: http://futuread.hypotheses.org/
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WORK IN PROGRESS:
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