The Distant Future? Reading Franco Moretti

Abstract

Franco Moretti’s suggestion that we swap close for distant reading has shaken up the academy. Yet while so many critics knows Moretti’s name, it can be difficult to pin down exactly what he’s saying. Without any single magnum opus to his name, Moretti’s points are instead scattered across a score of articles and a handful of short books. This article attempts to join the insights of books like Atlas of the European Novel and Graphs, Maps, Trees to those of articles like ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ and ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature,’ in hopes of providing a fuller picture of exactly what kind of reading (and what kinds of distance) are implied by distant reading.