Patterns and Interpretation
No Thumbnail Available
Can’t use the file because of accessibility barriers? Contact us with the title of the item, permanent link, and specifics of your accommodation need.
Date
2017-01-24
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Indiana University William T. Patten Foundation
Permanent Link
Abstract
Digitization has completely changed the literary archive. Historians of the novel used to work on a few hundred nineteenth-century novels; today, we work on thousands of them; tomorrow, hundreds of thousands. This new size has had a major effect on literary history, obviously enough, but also on critical methodology; because, when we work on 200,000 novels instead of 200, we are not doing the same thing, 1,000 times bigger; we are doing a different thing. The new scale changes our relationship to the object of study, and in fact it changes the object itself, by making it entirely abstract. And the question arises: what does it mean to study literature as an abstraction and by means of abstractions? We clearly lose some important aspects of the literary experience. Do we gain anything?
Description
Franco Moretti, Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University. Video recording of lecture presented on January 24, 2017, at Presidents Hall, Franklin Hall, Indiana University Bloomington.
Keywords
Citation
Journal
DOI
Link(s) to data and video for this item
Click on the PURL link below in the "External Files" section to play this video.
Rights
Type
Video