How Far is Far Enough?: Questioning Distance and Method in Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees

In reading Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees, I found myself asking: how is this different than strands of genre discourse in film studies? Burke, too, in his response to Moretti, brings up this very point.  He writes, “The study of genres has long been shaped by an interest in cycles of publication of the kind Moretti describes” (42).  It seems to me, in Moretti’s focus on “distant reading,” he ends up conducting a sort of analysis of literary cycles and shifts in genre that appears not too different than, say, the work of Thomas Schatz who discusses the film genre system as both “static and dynamic” (691)—analyzing, in part, aspects of convergence and divergence between genres.  Moretti’s tactic also appears similar to that of Bill Nichols, who painstakingly traces the similarities and differences in modes of documentary film making.  The similarities between these cases arise because they all invest themselves in selecting a set of texts (a set that by its very nature can never be exhaustive) and looking for moments of convergence and divergence.  From these structures, Moretti, Nichols, and Schatz (as well as numerous other scholars invested in taxonomy projects) make conjectures about trends as a whole.  Though this tactic by no means falls into the camp of “close reading,” how distant is it? Yes, Moretti is moving further away from the individual text in order to extrapolate on a larger scale, but this has been done before. My question becomes, how "total" is Moretti's outcome? How total can it be? He claims that by focusing on shifts in genre, he is focusing on the larger structure (as opposed to the smaller device) but I think, due to his methods, the size of his project is capped at genre analysis.

It seems like Moretti’s methods remain drastically dissimilar from my understanding of data mining, which also considers itself a sort of distant reading.  In Kirschenbaum’s discussion of his nora project, he discusses the ways he and his team searched for word occurrences in Project Muse. This tactic appears worlds apart from how Moretti derives his tree on detective fiction and the use of clues.  In order to obtain this data, Moretti had his graduate student “find all the mystery stories published in Strand during the first Holmes decade” (219).  Once she had located these stories (a total which came to 108 plus 50 others that sounded like mysteries), Moretti read them all.  From there, he made conjectures about the structures of these individual stories.  He just uses pretty trees to visualize his data, as opposed to the graphs that Nichols uses.

So, again I ask: Is Moretti doing anything different? I believe he thinks he’s doing something revolutionary and different in terms of achieving what he thinks will be (eventually) an exhaustive understanding of “world literature.”  In reality, though, I think he is doing little more than small-scale genre analysis.  Perhaps at a larger level, this might morph into larger understandings of trajectories in world literature, but I doubt it.  I doubt it mostly because this cannot be achieved on that large of scale because one can’t, as Moretti makes clear, read everything.  The option would be, then, to data mine in the sense of Kirschenbaum’s nora project.  There is only so much understanding that those types of projects can provide though.  Prendergast makes clear the level of interpretation that must (and does) enter into Moretti’s project (45).  This level of interpretation would have to wane if one were to conduct this task on any sort of larger scale. I think Moretti’s overall method is a legitimate and a useful one but, perhaps, not in the large-scale way he believes it to be.    

Burke, "Book Notes: Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees" 

  

Kirschenbaum, "Poetry, Patterns, Provocation" 

Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: IU Press, 2010.  

Schatz, Thomas “Film Genre and the Genre Film,”Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 6th ed. Ed. Braudy, Leo, and Gerald Mast. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 691-702.

A Jenkinsian Revamp of McGann's "Radiant Textuality"

Published in 2001, Jerome McGann’s Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web, smacks of outdatedness, a fact that is confirmed by the title itself as well as this telling line that reads, “We no longer have to use books to analyze and study other books or texts. That simple fact carries immense, even catastrophic, significance” (168).  While the book aches with its antiquated relishing of the potentialities offered by the “World Wide Web,” I do not propose a rejection McGann’s claims outright.  Instead, I propose an extension and renovation of his ideas through Henry Jenkins.  Hopefully, an application of his concepts to a more contemporary conversation will provides us the tools with which to discuss McGann’s claims without rejecting them outright. 

First and foremost, I took issue with McGann’s approach in which he heralded the potentials of hypermedia and hypertext for its extension and revolution of the book—a claim he himself seems to realize as too lofty.  Though that is true, he insists on touting the digital environment for the potentials it can offer a reader in terms of active participation.  He further emphasizes the ability to update and renew content of digital editions.  He writes, “When a book is produced it literally closes its covers on itself. If a work is continued, new edition, or other related books, have to be (similarly) produced” (69).  He discusses the way hypertext breaks out of both of these molds by offering 1) a “noncentralized structure of complex relationships” (72) as well as 2) a presentation of options “for the reader’s choice” (73). He continues with this thread throughout the book, asserting time and again how a “hypermedia ‘edition’ or ‘archive’ would make it possible to study literary and aesthetic works in entirely new ways” (140).  While I do not necessarily disagree with this claim, McGann seems bound by an idea that defines the digital edition as one contained on one platform. Yes, there will be new pages for one to navigate to and between, but ultimately, the digital edition exists as a linked hypertext document.  

The fact that he bases many of his claims on this assumption (as the Ivanhoe Game, too, is contained within one platform) threatens to make his larger claims almost irrelevant in a contemporary situation defined by, to borrow Jenkins’ term, transmedia texts.  Originally addressed in an article for MIT Technology Review and later expanded on in his own blog and in Convergence Culture, Jenkins defines transmedia storytelling as the enrichment of a story world through the expansion of a story to multiple media platforms, allowing each platform to “do what it does best.” This offers fans a more fulfilling and enriching experience as well as creates multiple opportunities for merchandising and franchising.  As Jenkins writes, “Reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption. In a world with many media options, consumers are choosing to invest deeply in a limited number of franchises rather than dip shallowly into a larger number.”  As such, one can see quite easily how literature after the “World Wide Web” and after 2001, involves multiple-platforms.  As such, our conversation this week would benefit from considering how this changes McGann’s ultimate stakes in his project, stakes based on the potentials offered by the ability to analyze all of the data that is collected on one platform, a task that cannot be currently accomplished in an internet that thrives off of the use of multiple platforms, ones often created by users themselves. 

He discusses how the transfer of literary texts into cyberspace lays the text open for participations that are no longer passive and “readerly” (159).  To me, his use of the word readerly automatically calls to mind Barthes’ distinction between the readerly and the writerly text. Though that is true, McGann fails to identify the type of interactivity he credits to the Ivanhoe Game as “writerly.” I think he is right in this evasion because the participation and production in the Ivanhoe Game is definitely not writerly, but I wonder how he would define the potentials it does offer. (Though, let us please not dip into a discussion of Fiske’s producerly text.)  McGann seems to prioritize the “performative and dynamic intellectual space” (221) created through these avenues of participatory engagement and I find it interesting, then, to discussion how these performtive spaces manifest themselves in our contemporary moment of participatory culture, one defined by acts of (to borrow from Jenkins’ Convergence Culture) collective intelligence (pooling of resources and knowledge in discussion groups), fan fiction and slash fiction, etc.  Participation like this, though, decentralizes the position of a text in a way that makes it impossible to collect and analyze data or the nature of those participations.  If that is the case, how does our overly networked web and participatory culture change McGann’s goals? Are they goals that can be accomplished? Is there simply too much decentralized data now? Is the purpose really then to be able to analyze the data from these spaces, or is it just to cultivate effective spaces that open themselves up as performative and intellectually dyanamic?