This article explores the complexities of creating an archive - in our case, a digital archive of eighteenth-century manuscript letters, The Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online (EMCO). Elizabeth ...Montagu was one of the most prominent and well-connected women in eighteenth-century polite society. EMCO faces a variety of challenges. Firstly, the project aims to trace all extant letters in different libraries and public/private collections; secondly, it seeks to amalgamate the extant correspondence into one digital repository and a comprehensive inventory; thirdly, it mobilises a team of scholars to transcribe, annotate and develop a critical apparatus; fourthly, EMCO seeks to develop digital tools that foster novel methods of scholarly research and debate. Taking recent scholarship on board, this article concludes by reflecting on the complexities of marrying a data-rich digital edition with literary methodologies that allow both close reading and analysis of the scope and materiality of the archive and its objects.
In Great Expectations, Charles Dickens uses the form of the Bildungsroman to demonstrate how the aspiration to transcend the world of labour transforms the everyday life of an otherwise nondescript ...individual. As money transforms social ties, the Bildungsroman naturalises the conflict between a system of social organisation where each generation would step into the shoes of the preceding one and another in which each generation desires to transcend the one before. To describe the novel in these terms is to suggest how Dickens broke from the critical position articulated by Franco Moretti, who would have us understand the English Bildungsroman as a form that aspires to reproduce, with minor adjustments, and stabilise a traditional social hierarchy. By rethinking Great Expectations as negotiating a major rift in the relation between the inner world of the individual and the world of objects, Dickens's disfigurations of the form can be seen to presage the emerging professional ruling class who reconcile upward mobility and love through service to others.
This essay analyses Kenneth Lonergan's television miniseries Howards End (2017, screenwriter Lonergan, director Hettie McDonald) and the film Margaret (2011, director and screenwriter Lonergan) as ...coming-of-age narratives in which tragic storylines pivot on the actions of young, middle-class women who insert themselves into the lives of other people. Deploying but departing from Marxist materialist analyses of the Bildungsroman, namely Franco Moretti's dialectical reading of the modern novel and Francis Mulhern's argument about the 'condition of culture' novel, my reading of Lonergan's Bildungsromane elucidates the significance of the digitally-networked environment in which these media were produced. While the form of the novel is central to Moretti's reading of the Bildungsroman as dialectic of transformation and convention, my analysis of Lonergan's networked Bildungsromane emphasises the role of both mixed-media and connectivity in how female characters are represented. With reference to Sianne Ngai's aesthetic-categorical reading of the 'interesting' as both a curious feeling and a measured evaluation, I focus on the portrayal of 'interested' young women in Lonergan's contemporary screen texts in order to investigate the limits and possibilities of a feminine drive toward resolution for selves and others.
Mid-Range Reading BOOTH, ALISON
PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,
05/2017, Letnik:
132, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
To judge by debates over distant reading, literary scholars might have something in common with the unadaptable tutor in george Eliot's
The Mill on the Floss
, the Rev. Mr. Stelling, who applies the ...same educational method to any boy in his charge: he sees Tom Tulliver's mind as a field to be plowed with the classics, not as a stomach that can't digest them. But if we look more closely at the range of projects in literary studies, from digital humanities to the new formalist poetics, we find few hidebound Stellings. Applying one's favorite method to all sizes and shapes of data is an obvious genre of error, and scholars and critics of all sorts studiously avoid it. In a maxim now popular among practitioners of digital humanities, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The humorous warning not to become enamored of shiny tools and ply them regardless of object (a schoolboy, all schoolboys) can come from people who use
MALLET
(
MAchine Learning for LanguagE Toolkit
) or other software to produce statistical analyses of words or of white spaces in nineteenth-century newspapers. As researchers who are primed to question the prescriptive bias of our
doxa
, our samples, our models, and our tools, we nevertheless have incentives to overstate the predictable errors of competing approaches.
The Doxa of Reading GOLDSTONE, ANDREW
PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,
05/2017, Letnik:
132, Številka:
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Journal Article
Recenzirano
Reading Franco Moretti's
Graphs, Maps, Trees
as a late-stage graduate student in 2008 was invigorating. Here was an approach to literary history free from the pieties of close reading, committed to ...empiricism, seeking to fulfill, with its “materialist conception of form,” the promise of the sociology of literature (92). And, at the time, it seemed natural that the way to follow the path laid out by Moretti in
Graphs
and in the essays he had published over the previous decade was to go to my computer, polish my rusty programming skills, and start making graphs. Yet reconsidering Moretti's
Distant Reading
now, one is struck by how nondigital the book is. In fact, the meaning of
distant reading
has undergone a rapid semantic transformation. In “Conjectures on World Literature,” originally published in 2000, Moretti introduces the phrase to describe “a patchwork of other people's research,
without a single direct textual reading
” (
Distant Reading
48). Today, however,
distant reading
typically refers to computational studies of text. Introducing a 2016 cluster of essays called “Text Analysis at Scale,” Matthew K. Gold and Lauren Klein employ the term to speak of “using digital tools to ‘read’ large swaths of text” (Introduction); in his contribution to the cluster, Ted Underwood embraces “distant reading” as a name for applying machine-learning techniques to unstructured text. Discussions of distant reading have become discussions of computation with text, even if no section of
Distant Reading
features the elaborate computations found in the Stanford Literary Lab pamphlets to which Moretti has contributed.
The Figure in the Carpet ARMSTRONG, NANCY; MONTAG, WARREN
PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,
05/2017, Letnik:
132, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Of Franco Moretti's masterworks of literary history and theory, why is it the loosely assembled collection of occasional pieces
Distant Reading
that has captured the literary critical spotlight? Why ...now, just when enrollments in the humanities are plummeting, new technologies for storing and distributing information are revolutionizing interpersonal communication and scientific methods, and
global
is well on its way to replacing
interdisciplinary
as the descriptor favored by university administrators? Moretti is not alone in attempting to reconfigure a discipline that tends to favor the singular text and national literary traditions for a generation of students who apparently could not care less about either. In his effort to adapt literary history and form to the conditions of globalization that make them seem irrelevant, he asks us to abandon our obsessive focus on canonical texts—to start instead considering how certain forms of literature made the quantum leap from nation to world and what formal changes they underwent in doing so. This project he warns, will require us to “unlearn” how to read a literary text and to question the assumption that “world literature” is an object to be known: “We must think of it as a problem that asks for a new critical method” (46). He famously exposes this problem by staging various encounters between literary form and quantitative analysis.
On the occasion of the recent publication (2019) of the French translation of a 1987 book by Franco Moretti (The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture), and returning to another of ...his books still not translated into French (The Bourgeois 2013), the author of this article proposes to explore Moretti’s thoughts on the novel, and more particularly the European novel of the 20th century. She analyses his comparative perspective and his theoretical framework, which borrows from Marxism and structuralism. She highlights Franco Moretti’s ambivalent position with respect to the novel, defined as the form of compromise, and towards the bourgeoisie and capitalism, whose evolution he sees as determining that of the novel in more or less complex ways. In contrast to the method of distant reading Moretti recommends in other books, in these two books, especially The Bourgeois, his practice is one of close reading and focuses on style and form. He defends the autonomy of art, resisting conceptions of art based on morality. He thus traces an original path, which calls for scientific models, notably Darwinian evolutionism, opposing current trends more interested in effects on the reader than in the works themselves.
In this article, I analyze Zola's often-understudied 1882 novel of the bourgeois apartment building, Pot-Bouille, to show how it stages the particular impossibility of accurately capturing the ...nineteenth-century bourgeois type and, more generally, a critique of naturalist method. Pot-Bouille exposes the hypocritical, even deceptive nature of the immeuble's residents through scenes where the narrator is the only one able to observe their duplicitous behavior; simultaneously, it offers numerous instances of imperceptibility or events that cannot be documented or observed. Studying this work alongside Zola's own preparatory notes and the novel's critical reception, I suggest that in this urban novel of the interior, the theories of observation imagined by the naturalist author (and by the first sociological thinkers too) prove at once indispensable and impossible. Ultimately, I argue that in its attempt to expose the difficulties in reducing the bourgeois to a knowable or essential type, Pot-Bouille anticipates twenty-first century scholars such as Sarah Maza, Franco Moretti, and others who write about the porous, even mythical nature of the concept of the bourgeoisie.
Beyond Darwinian Distance RHODY, LISA MARIE
PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,
05/2017, Letnik:
132, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The challenge facing “distant reading” has less to do with Franco Moretti's assertion that we must learn “how not to read” than with his implication that looking should take the place of reading. Not ...reading is the dirty open secret of all literary critics-there will always be that book (or those books) that you should have read, have not read, and probably won't read. Moretti is not endorsing a disinterest in reading either, like that reported in the 2004 National Endowment for the Arts'
Reading at Risk
, which notes that less than half the adult public in the United States read a work of literature in 2002 (3). In his “little pact with the devil” that substitutes patterns of devices, themes, tropes, styles, and parts of speech for thousands or millions of texts at a time, the devil is the image: trees, networks, and maps-spatial rather than verbal forms representing a textual corpus that disappears from view. In what follows, I consider
Distant Reading
as participating in the
ut pictura poesis
tradition-that is, the Western tradition of viewing poetry and painting as sister arts-to explain how ingrained our resistances are to Moretti's formalist approach. I turn to more recent interart examples to suggest interpretive alternatives to formalism for distant-reading methods.
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