Abstract
The paper discusses an intermediary phase in Franco Moretti’s intellectual journey, namely the years 1990s. This is a period of transition in Moretti’s thinking, in which he is working simultaneously on two fronts: on the one hand, he is refining evermore and bringing to completion his specific brand of close reading analysis developed in the previous decade – namely the combination of evolutionary theory, formal-rhetorical analysis, and eclectic Marxism (with its highly unstable mix of Lukács, Wallerstein, and Della Volpe); on the other, he is forging for the first time the new tools and concepts of what will become, after 2000, his defining intellectual signature – the method of distant reading. The two undertakings correspond to two opposed literary objects: on the one hand, the novel – with its regularity of form, reproduction in large scale, centripetal movement, bourgeois imaginary, and national horizon; on the other, what we call the ‘anti-novel’, which is the modern epic in Moretti’s understanding – the few dozen ‘world-texts’, highly polymorphous and reproducible only in few and select occurrences, centrifugal in their movement, and transcending the national and bourgeois horizon, rooted as they are in the critical, semi-peripheral junctures of the capitalist world-system. The paper dwells on some of the oppositions and similarities, overlaps and contradictions, theoretical problems and practical solutions, raised or offered by the two methodological approaches and their corresponding literary objects.
Highlights
In my attempt to reconstruct the evolution of Franco Moretti’s thinking,1 it might have been more suitable to divide the work space into only two sections: close reading and distant reading. This would have meant that the first period would end around the mid-90’s, with Opere mondo
The second would start immediately after, with Atlas of the European Novel (1997 Italian ed., 1998 the English one) and would last, if we include the long phase of increasing disenchantment with the paradigm, to the present day
Modern Epic is the fulfillment of the analyses and perspectives from previous volumes and because it develops or somehow totalizes the topic – the same literary genre – in an entire volume, as opposed to the more essayistic approach to each literary form in Signs, for example
Summary
In my attempt to reconstruct the evolution of Franco Moretti’s thinking,1 it might have been more suitable to divide the work space into only two sections: close reading and distant reading.
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