Reading Graphs, Maps, and Trees: Responses to Franco Moretti

By Parlor Press, LLC

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parlor Press, LLC
• Release date: Jan 14, 2011
• ISBN: 9781602356894

Book preview

ReadingGraphsMapsTrees.jpg

Glassbead Books

John Holbo, Editor

Reading Graphs, Maps, Trees

Responses to Franco Moretti

Edited by Jonathan Goodwin & John Holbo

a Valve book event

Parlor Press

Anderson, South Carolina

www.parlorpress.com

Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621

Printed in the United States of America

© 2011 by Parlor Press.

Reading Graphs, Maps, and Trees by http://www.parlorpress.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at www.thevalve.org. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reading Graphs, maps & trees : responses to Franco Moretti / edited by Jonathan Goodwin & John Holbo.

p. cm.

A Valve Book event.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-60235-205-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-206-3 (Adobe ebook)

1. Moretti, Franco, 1950- Graphs, maps, trees. 2. Fiction--History and criticism. 3. Literature--Philosophy. 4. Criticism. I. Goodwin, Jonathan, 1973 Nov. 26- II. Holbo, John, 1967- III. Title: Reading Graphs, maps and trees.

PN3331.M6737 2011

809--dc22

                                   2010054541

Cover design Belle Waring.

Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper and Adobe eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621, or email [e-mail].

Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models For Literary History is published by Verso (2005).

This ‘book event’ consisted of a series of posts about Moretti’s book at The Valve. The event was organized by Jonathan Goodwin. Readers met author, semi-seminar-style; still more readers left comments, blog-style. For this book, the posts have been edited for typos, clarity, style, second thoughts, suitability for inclusion. The original event archive as a whole has a permanent URL, should you wish to compare the original versions of these pieces with the versions included here:

http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/archive_asc/C48/

Paper has been a bit of a puzzle. We have opted to make it typographically clear where links appear in the electronic version. Readers of the paper version who wish to follow links can download the PDF version of the book from Parlor Press, or check the original posts.

Contents

Introduction

Jonathan Goodwin

1 Graphs, Maps, Trees, Fruits of The MLA

John Holbo

2 Graphs, Maps, Trees / Sets Hamper Grasp

Ray Davis

3 Poetry, Patterns, and Provocation: The nora Project

matthew kirschenbaum

4 Book Notes: Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, and Trees

Timothy Burke

5 A Brief Note on Moretti and Science Fiction

Adam Roberts

6 Maps, Iconic and Abstract

William Benzon

7 A Hundred Flowers

eric hayot

8 Moretti Responds

franco moretti

9 Moretti Responds (II)

franco moretti

10 Totality and the Genes of Literature

Jonathan Goodwin

11 Distant Reading Minds

Steven Berlin Johnson

12 The Next Cigarette and a Modest Garnish

jenny davidson

13 Judging Books by Their Covers - or - Chance Favors the Prepared Meme

John Holbo

14 Moretti Responds (III)

franco moretti

15 A Few Quibbles about Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees

Sean McCann

16 Graphs, Trees, Materialism, Fishing

Cosma Shalizi

contributors

Introduction

Jonathan Goodwin

There was almost universal enthusiasm for the perceived novelty and brilliance of Franco Moretti’s project in our book event, the third such event the Valve has hosted. Inter- and multi-disciplinarity is both praised and reviled by many academics; there is a sense that traditional disciplines are outmoded administrative conveniences but also suspicion of the possibility of mastering another field in an era of hyperspecialization. As a way of helping to assess this phenomenon in literary history and criticism, I will briefly discuss the use of interdisciplinary techniques in Moretti’s previous work, with special attention to the concepts borrowed from evolutionary biology. Afterwards, I will give an overview of the contributions in the present volume, many of which take as their starting point Moretti’s interest in evolution.

Purchasers of the most recent edition of Moretti’s collection of essays, Signs Taken for Wonders, may have noticed that the essay On Literary Evolution was not included. According to Moretti, this was an oversight. I mention this because many of the ideas that would lead to GMT are first presented here, and I wondered briefly if it were deliberately left out of the collection due to obsolescence. Moretti uses an evolutionary metaphor at the beginning of the essay. He argues that a Lamarckian understanding of evolution, one where variations are goal-oriented, characterizes the understanding of culture and of theories of history derived from Hegel. He suggests that instead it might be useful to apply a Darwinian understanding to this aspect of cultural evolution: what if variations in literary history are not teleological, and to explore the consequences of this postulate.

Moretti proposes first that chance generates rhetorical variations in literary history, with social necessity then selecting some of these variations (263). He borrows from Gould and Eldredge’s concept of punctuated equilibrium to describe the long periods of boredom, short periods of terror (268) in the development of literary forms. Hans Robert Jauss’s account of the success of the literary work being proportional to its distance from the age’s horizon of expectations is, for Moretti, essentially monistic.

The Italian critic Francesco Orlando’s concept of figurality rate, which Moretti closely identifies with literary complexity, provides a means of evaluating the micro-historical literary evolution process. (Moretti also uses some ideas about complexity theory from Prigogine and Stengers here to suggest the non-predictability of rapid conceptual change in the historical process.) The startling claim that follows is that the density of modernist poetry, with its never-before-equaled figurality rate, arises as an exaptation (in Gould and Vrba’s sense, the use of a trait or the combination of traits out of contingency rather than as a selected-for adaptation) from the development of ambiguity in the monologue in the tragic plot.

Moretti’s next work, The Way of the World, The Bildungsroman in European Culture, mentions the realization he had about the Russian Formalists’ critical novelty after reading Gould and Eldredge (247 n11) and also deploys the punctuated equilibrium concept to describe rapid conceptual change (232). The essay, A Useless Longing for Myself. The Crisis of the European Bildungsroman, 1898-1914 also specifically invokes the punctuated equilibrium metaphor. I mention this because it leads to one of the key observations that underlies GMT and was explicitly developed in work beginning with Conjectures on World Literature and The Slaughterhouse of Literature in addition to Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900: that the canon is very small. Therefore, the new forms that develop and drive literary evolution emerge out of long periods of non-canonical stasis and lack of differentiation.

The change in Moretti’s project that begins around The Atlas of the European Novel depends on the realization that, while the canonical texts are the bottlenecks of literary evolution, that they cannot be studied in isolation. He humorously describes close reading as a secularized theology emanating from New Haven (Slaughterhouse 208), and suggests that, to understood world literature in its context, that distant reading has to replace it (Conjectures 56). The great unread mass must be studied in order to see macroevolutionary patterns in literary history. The canonical texts are those which persist from generation-to-generation. They have the ability, even if they are not immediately popular, to entice readers to discover their virtues. (Moretti describes a similar dynamic with the worldwide reaction to the Hollywood film in Planet Hollywood.) In a footnote, Moretti mentions that both The Red and the Black and Moby Dick, two conventional counterexamples, went through many editions in the era when they are claimed to have been ignored or unappreciated (Slaughterhouse 210 n4).

Contributor to this volume Cosma Shalizi wrote a useful review of Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 in which he took Moretti to task for some failure to use all of the statistical tools at his disposal. He found Moretti’s project interesting enough to review however, and he is a statistical physicist by trade. I will discuss Shalizi’s ideas about Moretti in more detail a bit later, but I bring this up to highlight the self-conscious novelty of Moretti’s scientific approach. Critics might, and I believe have, called it scientistic, an insult as deadly as positivist in literary studies. Though I do not agree with this assessment, I feel that the abstract and scientific basis (a more rational literary history) is so central to Moretti’s project that it should be discussed.

Shalizi tweaks some humanistic noses a bit in his review, noting that Moretti is able to quote from the popular writings of Darwin and Kuhn’s Structure intelligently, leaving the reader to infer that this is rare. As we have seen, Moretti’s range of reference to evolutionary biology is heavily inclined toward Gould, and the ideas of exaptation and punctuated equilibrium do transfer well to literary studies. (In one of his responses in this volume, Moretti notes that he is not impressed with many of the current efforts in literary studies to use evolutionary approaches. Most of these have been strongly influenced by strains of evolutionary psychology, and Gould’s polemic against that, and, in the larger context, the strong adaptationism of Dawkins and Dennett, seems to have influenced him as well.) As the foreword to GMT notes, Moretti was trained in a Marxist tradition that emphasized the scientific search for truth and objectivity and reacted against the discipline’s turn to French and German metaphysics (2).

Alberto Piazza, one of the authors of The Human Geography of Genes, writes an afterword to GMT which discusses the potential usefulness of evolutionary concepts in literary studies from the perspective of a population geneticist. Piazza identifies genetic drift as an important concept in cultural transmission which would need further elaboration in Moretti’s model (104). Piazza notes the the phylogenetic tree in molecular biology presupposes no natural selection effects, since the convergences and divergences exhibited by selective pressure would cancel each other out, but that the trees devised by Moretti are primarily interested in the selected-for effects. (Piazza also notes the presence of Mayr’s allopatric speciation in Moretti’s work on the spread of free indirect style, another major evolutionary theoretical concept used to illustrate a pattern in literary history.) The use of phylogenetic trees in evolutionary biology, according to Piazza, is best suited to the history of a gene. The autonomous aspects of the unit in question in Moretti’s literary analysis and how it can be compared to the biological concept of a gene is discussed briefly in my contribution to this volume.

Before turning to an overview of this volume’s contents, I will briefly review the illuminating exchange between Moretti and Christopher Prendergast in the New Left Review on GMT. Prendergast argues that Moretti does not have a causal mechanism to explain why readers of Arthur Conan Doyle selected clues as the main determinant of his popularity, and Moretti answers that, while he did propose a black box type of mechanism here, he now believes that cognitive science might provide an explanatory mechanism (75), it’s worth noting that Moretti cites Steven Johnson’s entry in this volume—and personal communication resulting from it, as the source of this insight). The major theoretical problem that Prendergast identifies in GMT is that Moretti posits a divergent model of cultural evolution whereas the presiding explanations for models of cultural change emphasize convergence. The persistence of symbolic forms, for Moretti, is why literary history branches rather than amalgamates.

A recurrent point in Moretti’s response to Prendergast is the distinction proposed by Noam Chomsky between problems and mysteries. Problems have a field of conceptual understanding; not everything is known but the contours of inquiry are well-established. Progress has been charted and will continue. Mysteries, on the other hand, are not understood. Progress has not been made on them, though their formulation dates to antiquity. Moretti ends his response by noting that the concepts he has addressed in GMT are largely mysteries, whereas Prendergast’s specific criticisms suggest that they are problems. The abstractional techniques are exploratory measures designed to reduce mysteries to problems, as Chomsky has described his work in linguistics. Moretti concludes with a reconsideration of the