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46-418: Many scholars assert that what makes a work considered world literature is its circulation beyond its country of origin. For example, David Damrosch states, "A work enters into world literature by a double process: first, by being read as literature; second, by circulating out into a broader world beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin". Likewise, the world literature scholar Venkat Mani believes that

92-549: A dissertation on the British poets and intellectuals of the 1930s. He was initially a researcher at the Universities of Pescara and Rome (1972–1979), one of the founding editors of the journals Calibano and Il leviatano , and a contributor to the cultural pages of the new left daily newspaper il manifesto . In 1977–78 he was a Fulbright scholar at Occidental College . Later, he taught English and Comparative Literature at

138-661: A dozen languages, including Chinese, Russian, Turkish and Korean. Over the years, Moretti has been visiting professor at various universities in Europe and North America – including Copenhagen, Toronto, La Sapienza, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris – twice a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1999–2000, 2012–2013), advisor of the French Ministry for Education, and member of

184-662: A member of the Brno Narratological Circle. His latest book – Far Country. Scenes from American Culture , published simultaneously in Italy, the United States and Britain in 2019 – is framed by a long reflection on his first and last university courses, that covers the years from 1979 to 2016; the German edition – Ein fernes Land , Konstanz University Press, 2020 – has been saluted as a "future standard for

230-530: A new "expanded edition" in 1995 with non-Western selections. Major survey anthologies today, including those published by Longman, Bedford and Norton, showcase several hundred authors from dozens of countries. The explosive growth in the range of cultures studied under the rubric of world literature has inspired a variety of theoretical attempts to define the field and to propose effective modes of research and teaching. In his 2003 book What Is World Literature? David Damrosch understands world literature to be less of

276-406: A new Institute for World Literature, offering month-long summer sessions on theory and pedagogy, had its inaugural session at Peking University in 2011, with its next sessions at Istanbul Bilgi University in 2012 and at Harvard University in 2013. Since the middle of the first decade of the new century, a steady stream of works has provided materials for the study of the history of world literature and

322-504: A new – cartographic – perspective on literature in his Atlas of the European Novel (1997). On the one hand, he demonstrated geographic patterns that can be traced within literature: the geography of Jane Austen's characters, places of origin of villains in British literature, the locations of Balzac's novels, etc. This, though, was hardly original: Vladimir Nabokov famously taught novelists such as Jane Austen and James Joyce with

368-410: A number of materialistic, empirical approaches to literature and other arts. His major contributions were in the domains of literary geography (now largely associated with Moretti's name ) and digital humanities; he also contributed to combining literary studies with the world-systems analysis and Darwinian theory of evolution. Moretti has coined several concepts that are now widely used in the humanities,

414-604: A process of trade and exchange, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels used the term in their Communist Manifesto (1848) to describe the "cosmopolitan character" of bourgeois literary production, asserting that: In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climates. ... And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from

460-490: A vast collection of works and more a matter of circulation and reception. He proposed that works that thrive as world literature are ones that work well and even gain meaning through translation. Whereas Damrosch's approach remains tied to the close reading of individual works, a different view was taken by the Stanford critic Franco Moretti in a pair of articles offering "Conjectures on World Literature". Moretti believes that

506-444: A visible actor in the new field of digital humanities . Equally novel was the concept of the humanities "lab", as it is mostly associated with hard sciences. In many of his works, Moretti relies on one strand of historical macrosociology – world-systems analysis – and its main theorist, Immanuel Wallerstein . World-systems analysis divides all countries into three groups: core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral. Core countries dominate

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552-434: Is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of men. ... I therefore like to look about me in foreign nations, and advise everyone to do the same. National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach. Reflecting a fundamentally economic understanding of world literature as

598-485: Is the work of French critic Pascale Casanova, La République mondiale des lettres (1999). Drawing on the theories of cultural production developed by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Casanova explores the ways in which the works of peripheral writers must circulate into metropolitan centers in order to achieve recognition as being world literature. The field of world literature continues to generate debate, with critics such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak arguing that too often

644-468: Is written for a global audience. In the postwar era, the study of comparative and world literature was revived in the United States. Comparative literature was seen at the graduate level while world literature was taught as a first-year general education class. The focus remained largely on the Greek and Roman classics and the literature of major, modern Western-European powers, but a combination of factors in

690-782: The Institute for World Literature in 2010 and has previously been the president of the American Comparative Literature Association. In 2023 he was awarded the Balzan Prize . This biography of an American historian is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Franco Moretti Franco Moretti (born 1950 in Sondrio ) is an Italian literary historian and theorist. He graduated in Modern Literatures from

736-865: The University of Rome in 1972. He has taught at the universities of Salerno (1979–1983) and Verona (1983–1990); in the US, at Columbia (1990–2000) and Stanford (2000–2016), where in 2000 he founded the Center for the Study of the Novel , and in 2010, with Matthew Jockers, the Stanford Literary Lab . Moretti has given the Gauss Seminars at Princeton , the Beckman Lectures at Berkeley ,

782-717: The Wayback Machine He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the American Philosophical Society , and of the scientific board of the "Institute for World Literature" at Harvard. He is a regular contributor to New Left Review , and has continued to advise doctoral students in various countries (Tartu, Lausanne, Harvard, Paris, Siena), receiving an honorary doctorate from Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj, and becoming

828-852: The "Digital Humanities Institute" of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland (2016–2019). [3] Archived 2019-01-03 at the Wayback Machine He has given the Gauss Seminars at Princeton , the Beckman Lectures at Berkeley , and the Carpenter Lectures at the University of Chicago, the Patten Lectures at Indiana University and the Iser lecture at the University of Konstanz. The work of this "great iconoclast of literary criticism", as The Guardian once called him, has been translated into 30 languages, and has been

874-468: The "making" of world literature". Johann Wolfgang Goethe used the concept of world literature in several of his essays in the early decades of the nineteenth century to describe the international circulation and reception of literary works in Europe, including works of non-Western origin. The concept achieved wide currency after his disciple Johann Peter Eckermann published a collection of conversations with Goethe in 1835. Goethe spoke with Eckermann about

920-408: The "worlding" of literature is brought about by " information transfer " largely generated by developments in print culture. Because of the advent of the library, "Publishers and booksellers who print and sell affordable books, literate citizens who acquire these books, and public libraries that make these books available to those who cannot afford to buy them collectively play a very important role in

966-508: The Black, Eugene Onegin, Lost Illusions, Great Expectations, Sentimental Education, Middlemarch ... – considered as the "symbolic form" that allowed nineteenth-century culture to make sense of the political revolutions and economic transformations of western modernity. Modern Epic. The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez (1996), broadened the analysis in space and time, examining texts that transcend national cultures in trying to represent

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1012-497: The Carpenter Lectures at the University of Chicago, and has been a lecturer and visiting professor in many countries, including, until the end of 2019, the Digital Humanities Institute at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne . Franco Moretti is an Italian literary historian and theorist. Born in Sondrio in 1950, he graduated in Modern Literatures from the University of Rome in 1972, after writing

1058-487: The French journal Romantisme in 2021. His work – and in particular the formula " distant reading ", presented in the essay "Conjectures on World Literature" – has inspired books and journal issues, and generated work in the disparate fields of literary criticism, philosophy, political science, law, plus conferences and long-term research projects in several countries. Most recently, Moretti's work has been examined in

1104-437: The Universities of Salerno (1979–1983), Verona (1983–1990), Columbia (1990–2000) and Stanford (2000–2016), where in 2000 he founded the Center for the Study of the Novel , [1] and in 2010, with Matthew Jockers, the Stanford Literary Lab [2] .A volume collecting a selection of Literary Lab pamphlets has recently been translated into French, German, Spanish, and Italian, while individual pamphlets have appeared into more than

1150-551: The aid of location maps. On the other hand, Moretti suggested studying the geography of literary economics: how and why translations of novels spread across Europe, how book selection in small town libraries differ from book selection in the libraries in large cities, etc. Together with Matthew Jockers, Moretti founded Stanford Literary Lab in 2010. Already in his Atlas of the European Novel , Moretti approached literature with quantitative methods. The Literary Lab continued this direction of work, but this time quantifying literature via

1196-493: The collection Critica sperimentale , with contributions by Gisèle Sapiro , Patricia McManus, Guido Mazzoni, Francoise Lavocat, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Stefano Ercolino, Jérôme David and others. In 2017, Kimberly Latta accused Moretti, in a Facebook post, of having sexually assaulted her in 1985. He denied the accusation, stating their relationship had been fully consensual. According to Latta, Moretti threatened he would destroy her career if she spoke about his behavior, and she

1242-864: The current debates. Valuable collections of essays include: Individual studies include: David Damrosch David Damrosch is an American literary historian, was born in Maine and raised there and in New York, currently the Ernest Bernbaum Professor at Harvard University and an Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences . His great-great-grandfather was Leopold Damrosch . Damrosch studied at Yale University , receiving his BA in 1975 and his PhD in 1980. He taught at Columbia University from 1980 until 2009 when he moved to Harvard University . He founded

1288-409: The domain of arts. Certain countries have monopoly over producing film or literary forms, while other countries import those forms. According to Moretti, in the 19th century England and France constituted the core of the literary world-system, exporting novels worldwide; today, Hollywood , which exports movies has a similar role. Applying Darwinian theory to literature is an idea that dates back to

1334-570: The evolution of a particular artistic device over many decades. Moretti's conception of literary evolution in Distant Reading (2013) is quite similar to the psychologist Colin Martindale's ( Clockwork Muse , 1990) "scientific," computational, neo-Darwinist project of literary evolution. The role of reading is downplayed by both Martindale and Moretti. Martindale's book has been largely ignored by literary scholars. According to Martindale,

1380-513: The excitement of reading Chinese novels and Persian and Serbian poetry as well as of his fascination with seeing how his own works were translated and discussed abroad, especially in France. He made a famous statement in January 1827, predicting that world literature would replace the national literature as the major mode of literary creativity in the future: I am more and more convinced that poetry

1426-795: The field" and "a mandatory reading for all those who are beginning to study the humanities". During the pandemic of 2020–22, Moretti has continued to give lectures online for audiences in Copenhagen, Berlin, Delhi, Naples, São Paulo and more. He is the brother of Italian filmmaker and Palme d'Or -winner Nanni Moretti . He played roles in three films directed by his brother: The Defeat ( La sconfitta , 1973, short), Pâté de bourgeois (1973, short), and I Am Self Sufficient ( Io sono un autarchico , 1976). Moretti has made several contributions to literary history and theory. Some ideas popularized by Moretti are traceable to earlier sources. Opposing subjective interpretations of literature, Moretti proposed

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1472-469: The late 1980s and early 1990s led to greater access to the world. The end of the Cold War, the growing globalization of the world economy, and new waves of immigration led to several efforts to expand the study of world literature. This change is illustrated by the expansion of The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces , whose first edition in 1956 featured only Western-European and North American works, to

1518-554: The late 19th century (initial attempts were made by Ferdinand Brunetière and Alexander Veselovsky ). Literary Darwinism becomes a popular movement in 20th century literary criticism. Joseph Carroll, Denis Dutton, Jonathan Gottschall, Brian Boyd, Ellen Spolsky, Nancy Easterlin, among others, contributed to the evolutionary literary studies. In their wake, Moretti used the techniques of "distant reading": statistics and computation to study literary evolution. The interest in Darwin's theory in

1564-562: The literature" (p. 14). Martindale's idea of the computerized and statistical data replacing reading has been reiterated by Moretti. Moretti's scientific work has largely focused on European bourgeois culture, beginning with The Way of the World. The Bildungsroman in European Culture (1987, second enlarged ed. 2000). The book examines the great tradition of the novel of youth – Wilhelm Meister , Pride and Prejudice, The Red and

1610-402: The main of which is distant reading . Distant reading is opposed to close reading: a traditional approach in literary studies when a critic closely examines a separate text, traces all the possible intertextual connections. Distant reading has the opposite goal: the scholar should "step back" from an individual text to see a larger picture: for example, the history of a genre during a century or

1656-574: The most influential texts of the twentieth century. While Marx and Engels followed Goethe in viewing world literature as a modern or future phenomenon, in 1886 the Irish scholar H. M. Posnett argued that world literature first arose in ancient empires, such as the Roman Empire, long before the rise of the modern national literature. Today, world literature is understood to encompass classical works from all periods, including contemporary literature that

1702-474: The numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. Martin Puchner has stated that Goethe had a keen sense of world literature as driven by a new world market in literature. This market-based approach was sought by Marx and Engels in 1848 through their Manifesto document, which was published in four languages and distributed among several European countries, and has since become one of

1748-481: The object of two collections of essays – Reading Graphs, Maps, Trees. Critical Responses to Franco Moretti , in 2011, and Lire de près, de loin , in 2014. The essays Moretti collected in Distant Reading received in 2014 the prize of the "National Book Critics' Circle". The Los Angeles Review of Books and PMLA have devoted special forums to his work, as has the Russian journal New Literary History in 2018, and

1794-480: The planetary system of capitalism: Faust, Moby-Dick, Wagner's Ring, Ulysses , The Waste Land, and the great narratives of Latin-American magic realism. More recently, The Bourgeois. Between History and Literature (2013) has completed this trilogy of bourgeois existence by tracing its historical keywords ("useful", "comfort", "efficiency", "seriousness", "roba" ...), and following the metamorphoses of "prose" from Defoe to Ibsen and Max Weber . Moretti has offered

1840-414: The principles of the evolution of art are based on statistic regularities rather than meaning, data or observation. "So far as the engines of history are concerned, meaning does not matter. In principle, one could study the history of a literary tradition without reading any of literature. […] the main virtue of the computerized content analysis methods I use is that they save one from actually having to read

1886-534: The scale of world literature exceeds what can be grasped by traditional methods of close reading, and advocates instead a mode of "distant reading" that would look at large-scale patterns as discerned from publication records and national literary histories. Moretti's approach combined elements of evolutionary theory with the world-systems analysis pioneered by Immanuel Wallerstein , an approach further discussed since then by Emily Apter in her influential book The Translation Zone . Related to their world-systems approach

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1932-562: The study of world literature in translation smooths out both the linguistic richness of the original and the political force a work can have in its original context. Other scholars, on the contrary, emphasize that world literature can and should be studied with close attention to original languages and contexts, even as works take on new dimensions and new meanings abroad. World literature series are now being published in China and in Estonia, and

1978-536: The tools of digital text analysis. Those methods include counting word frequencies , topic modeling , building character networks, etc. The results of Lab's work were published as Pamphlets of the Literary Lab (the history of how Lab arrived at this unusual publication format is described by Moretti in Pamphlet 12 ). Stanford Literary Lab became one of the pioneering groups pursuing computational criticism, and

2024-415: The world by having a monopoly over some kind of products, which they export to the peripheral and semi-peripheral countries. Over time, the latter countries learn how to produce the much needed products themselves, but core countries usually acquire monopolies over other important products, and so the structure of the world-system remains relatively stable. Moretti suggested that the same principle may work in

2070-434: Was afraid of being punished somehow for speaking out. Later, two other allegations of harassment from the 1990s emerged, both denied by Moretti. The Stanford Daily reported about a woman who recalled she had set a dog loose to stop Moretti’s unreciprocated advances; in that same Daily article, another graduate student at Johns Hopkins University said that Moretti had inappropriately touched her. No formal proceeding of any sort

2116-524: Was ever opened against him. A Stanford spokesperson declared that the university was reviewing the case and "determining whether there are any actions for Stanford to take", and the process was concluded without any action ever being taken. Moretti is currently emeritus professor at Stanford, [4] and a "permanent fellow" at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. [5] Archived 2019-08-28 at

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