Monday, February 18, 2013

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.


5 comments:

  1. But, the singular difference between genre studies and Moretti's project is that where genre studies concern themselves with defining a genre and trends within that genre, the thrust of Moretti's argument is toward interactions between genres. The former focuses on classification and hermeneutics at the level of the text(ie., a formalist "this kind of text works this way"); Moretti's work focuses on material production and consumption.

    Granted, this means that he makes some wild generalizations about which genres exist and which text goes into which genre--but that's because he isn't studying genre, in the end, methinks.

    If I can be even nastier than I already feel that I'm being in this response (for which I apologize): I would also conjecture that film's preoccupation with proving that it's just as valid as literature contributes to this difference. I've not read Nichols and Schatz, but I know for sure that Moretti doesn't have to prove to himself or anyone else that the Romantic novel is a "legitimate" object of study in textual studies. I'm not saying that this makes film inferior; I'm saying that it makes film pay closer attention to the definition of its own media and the genres of that media. Moretti can afford to be lose because his field of inquiry has enough cultural capital behind it.

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  2. I agree that Moretti's overall goal does seem to be different than a typical genre analysis- I was just pointing to what seemed to be very clear similarities between them.

    That said, in film at least, genre analyses tend to concern themselves with interactions between genres as well. I quoted Schatz earlier in his discussion of "static and dynamic" genres- in which he discusses the blurring of boundaries, the interactions between genres, why certain genres shift at certain historical moments and in response to specific technological achanges as well as changes in reception. Is THAT different than Moretti's focus on material production and consumption? To me, it sounds incredibly similar.

    Furthermore, and perhaps this is due to my own stake in film studies, I do not think contemporary film criticism necessarily concerns itself with proving its legitimacy as a discipline. The same cannot necessarily be said for new media, digital humanities, comics/graphic novels or other versions of "new media studies" but, to me, film theory has moved past that.

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  3. I agree, in part, that Moretti's SIR Arthur Conan Doyle does not exactly fall in line with the kind of world lit gesture he offers elsewhere, but it would be worthwhile to say why that is (not, I think, because he has an inadequate conception of a world lit project as you perhaps suggest). Moretti has in mind his Tree/Wave system, wherein local/national scholars work on projects like his own on SIR Arthur Conan Doyle and then some group of comp lit people get together and put the data from the hard working nationalist literary scholars. Indeed, what you look at here is a limited and not entirely World Lit project, but it seems that this is only half of the Moretti equation in a division of labor.

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  4. To add to Joe's comments, another fun way to use Moretti's Tree/Wave system is to open it up across different media. In addition to representing the complexities of comparative world literature, the tree (not linear, but divergences opening to convergences opening to more divergences) offers a useful logic for analyzing the intertextuality which has come to define our interaction with media. How do definite generic characteristics - the clue from detective fiction, the novum in science fiction, etc. - migrate from book to film to song to game and back again, and in what sense do these formal characteristics preserve the integrity of the genre? Do we see genres manifesting according to a specific order? Book, then film, then game? Film, then game, then book, then comic? These are questions that it seems a tree could clarify.

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  5. My reply applies rather broadly to all of the blogs this week, but for whatever reason I've decided to post it here. A lot of the discussion this week on the use(ful/less)ness of Moretti reminds me of a topic we've been discussing in Don Morton's class. Don posits that one of the central questions of history has been, "can one attain reliable knowledge of the social totality?" For Marx, the answer was obviously "yes;" class struggle is the key from which we can understand every other social relation (and many other theorists have made equally persuasive arguments to the contrary). Moretti seems to me to be dealing with a similar question, namely, "can one attain reliable knowledge of the literary totality?" It seems that his answer would also be "yes," and graphs/maps/trees are some possible means by which this can be accomplished. While it is literally impossible to read every text within a lifetime, it is very possible to have a computer interpret and display data about every text. Of course, this project would greatly depend on our ability to tell the computer what we want from it (Moretti had to read a great number of mystery stories before he was able to formulate categories). Nevertheless, it seems achievable. Distant reading should not, and indeed, cannot replace the practice of close reading; but I don't see why we can't use it as an incredibly powerful tool.

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