Novel and Anti-Novel. Moretti Before Distant Reading
Novel and Anti-Novel. Moretti Before Distant Reading

Summary/Abstract: The paper discusses an intermediary phase in Franco Moretti’s intellectual journey, namely the 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 and bringing to completion the style of close reading analysis he developed in the previous decade – namely the combination of evolutionary theory, formal-rhetorical analysis, and eclectic Marxism (with its highly volatile mix of Lukács, Wallerstein, and Della Volpe); on the other, he is forging the tools and concepts of what would become, after 2000, his defining intellectual signature – distant reading. The two undertakings correspond to two opposed literary objects: on the one hand, the novel – with its regularity of form, large-scale reproduction, centripetal movement, bourgeois imaginary, and national focus; 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 perspectives, 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.

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