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.