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.
Algorithm and Analogy NICHOLSON, CATHERINE
PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,
05/2017, Letnik:
132, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The chapter titled the “Reading of Bookes” in Francis Meres'S 1598
Palladis Tamia
offers two competing prescriptions for the allocation of readerly attention. The first suggests that too-close ...reading spoils some books: “As the scent of spices and flowers is more acceptable somewhat off then close to the nose: so there are some things that please, if they be lightly passed over; which being exactly looked into do loose their grace” (266v). The second reverses that logic by way of a fresh analogy: “Those things that live long, doe not soon spring up: so that worke which thou wouldst have alwaies to be read, ought to be throughly laboured in, and seriouslie scanned” (267r). On the face of it, Meres's book—a six-hundred-and-sixty-five-page-long compendium of moral and practical precepts, each cast in the repetitive syntax of the similitude—is evidently the first sort of text. At once dizzingly various and mind-numbingly repetitive,
Palladis Tamia
is a book to “be lightly passed over”—“scanned” in the modern, not the sixteenth-century, sense of the word. That is certainly the case today, when
Palladis Tamia
is known primarily for a single chapter, “A Comparative Discourse of Our English Poets, with the Greeke, Latine, and Italiane Poets,” Meres's pioneering survey of English Renaissance writing, and above all for a handful of sentences in that chapter, which offer a rare glimpse into the early career of William Shakespeare. “As the soule of
Euphorbus
was thought to live in
Pythagoras
: so the sweete wittie soule of
Ovid
lives in mellifluous and honytongued
Shakespeare,”
Meres declares. “As
Epius Stolo
said, that the Muses would speake with
Plautus
tongue, if they would speak Latin: so I say that the Muses would speak with
Shakespeares
fine filed phrase, if they would speake English” (281v, 282r).
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.
This project begins with an investigation of a case study in literary analysis that attempts to bring together close and distant reading techniques to enhance the output of both methods. The ...investigation reveals not only a breakdown in the attempted corroboration of truth claims and evidence across methods, but a tension felt more broadly in the discourse surrounding distant reading as a methodological and disciplinary position. In response to this problematic, I access C.S. Peirce and John Dewey to construct an argument for a pragmatic model for mediating between the more traditional methods employed in literary studies and the computational tools explored and used by scholars of distant methods. This discussion is foregrounded in the hermeneutic response of Julie Orlemanski to the discursive gap between methods. Taking the notion of scales of reading as a starting point, the pragmatic approach offers to place the output of close and distant methods within Dewey’s pattern of inquiry and accounts for the potential disciplinary conflict with Peirce’s logic of abduction. The former stands as a metaphorical interlocutor between computational models and the more heuristic approaches often found in literary analysis while the latter is placed into conversation with Ariana Ciula and Cristina Marras’s “Circling Around Texts and Language: Towards Pragmatic Modelling” to reveal that pragmatism contains a viable set of analytical tools for creating and interpreting evidence in literary studies using digital methods. I conclude by looking towards applying the pragmatic tools used to analyze this case study to a larger discussion of the discursive unease unearthed in the examination of the scholarship of digital method.
Are Novels Literature? Armstrong, Nancy; Montag, Warren
Novel : a forum on fiction,
2017-November, 20171101, 2017-11-1, Letnik:
50, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Armstrong and Montag offer a suspicious reading of the posttheoretical attempt to confine literature to the “surface” of the singular text. They suggest that there's a reason why this effort to ...redefine the way we read literature coincides with a number of major theoretical attempts to formulate global or world systems of literature. Drawing on Franco Moretti's recent call for us to “unlearn” our traditional literary training, they contend that novels defy any attempt to confine them to the boundaries of the individual work or a national tradition, raising basic questions about what we do as literary scholars who read novels: Does the failure of novels to observe the categories of the literary discipline mean that they are not in fact literature? Or do we have to rethink both the novel and the discipline that has had trouble housing it—especially in recent years?
In my thesis I examine Bildungsroman of the 20th century in colonial and post-colonial societies to discuss both how empire shaped the structure of the genre in the 19th century and why that ...structure became increasingly untenable as the 20th century progressed. Using Franco Moretti’s definition of the classical Bildungsroman and Tobias Boes’s concept of national-historical-time’s construction of a nationalistic identity, I show how the genre moved away from an attempt to legitimize and perpetuate the upper-class society of a colonial empire to one that exposed the limitations of upper-class socialization for protagonists who do not match the conventional class, gender, and sexuality standards of the classical Bildungsroman. By examining Japanese Bildungsroman before and after World War II and Zimbabwean Bildungsroman shortly after the country’s independence, I will show how empire enabled the potential for classical Bildungsroman protagonists to experience the definite ending Moretti describes as quintessential to the classical Bildungsroman, creating the illusion of upper-class self-sustainability, while protagonists from societies that have been exploited by empire, lack the resources and institutional support for the intended closed ending and were therefore unable to come to the same definite conclusion of Moretti’s classical Bildungsroman.
Pero todos comparten el problema de la indistinción que desdibuja contrastes nítidos e impide decidir si lo que una imagen muestra son pelos o pasto, materia animal o vegetal, cuerpo natural o cuerpo ...artificial, como observa Cortés Rocca a partir de las imágenes de Santiago Porter en "Flores de papel". ¿Cómo leer Vanity, la performance de Nicola Constantino, analizada por Mariela Herrero, donde la artista "actúa" de sí misma y se deja contemplar en el acto anodino, común, vanidoso de peinarse frente el espejo? Cuadernos de Literatura 20.40 (2016): 228- 240. http://dx.doi.org/10.11144/Javeriana.cl20-40.dccr 1 Por ejemplo, Terry Smith, refiriéndose al texto de Jean-Luc Nancy, "L'arte oggi" (2007), dice que "Nancy is here identifying some of the key elements of what I see as a world historical shiftfrom modernity through posmodernity to contemporaneity" ("Agamben and Nancy" 8). Véase también Smith, Qué es el arte contemporáneo. 2 En rigor, la teoría asoció lo contemporáneo con lo arcaico desde que el término ingresó en el repertorio crítico: el tiempo-con, del que habla Antelo en un artículo publicado en esta misma revista, lo arcaico-contemporáneo en términos de Agamben o Rancière en La política de la estética. 3 Dice Terry Smith al respecto: "The past present future triad divides us no longer, as contemporaneity includes within its diversity many revived pasts and wished for futures, all of which are being lived out as live present. Fue profesor en las universidades de Temple (Estados Unidos), de Buenos Aires, de San Andrés, Mar del Plata, Rosario, Salta, New York University Buenos Aires -cuya sede dirigió entre 2008 y 2013- y en la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Río de Janeiro.
The emergence of world literature as a crucial academic discourse in recent decades has transformed scholarly discussions in postcolonial literary studies and comparative literature. ...English’s ...role as the vanishing mediator provides the book with its titular conceit: “forget English” is both an imperative as well as a comment on the present historical conjuncture that enables world literature to be. Moving away from normative accounts of world literature as emerging from Goethe’s comment on weltliteratur, Mufti suggests instead that the category originates in colonial power structures and the project of Orientalism, which he understands succinctly as the “cultural logic of colonial rule” (22). The first chapter contends that world literature “pays scant attention to the very historical process that is its condition of possibility,” namely “the assimilation of vastly dispersed and heterogenous writing practices and traditions into the space of ‘literature’” (57).
Barthes, Moretti, and the no-name ‘bourgeois.’ Notes on two ‘critical intellectuals.’ Franco Moretti and Roland Barthes have always been critical intellectuals. Their interest in literature has ...always been more than pathos for a summa of good & beautiful, human, eternal truths: a means of expanding and deepening knowledge of dialectic human truth as revealed within history. They have focused on a few seminal topics and principles. In the following article, we want to draw attention to one of those topics – the “bourgeois” – and on some methodological principles: a historical and sociological reading of literary texts stemming from the importance given to the nineteenth century as the reverse point of European modernity and the moralities one can draw out of considering the relationship between literary style and social realities (sort of materialist formalism). It will be no wonder that both theoreticians focus, at a given moment, on the idea of neutral as a mode of existence of (or out of) the “bourgeois” life. Literature would be, for Moretti and Barthes, not the place meant for power production (through hierarchy building), but one of the places in which human societies reveal to themselves.
El artículo analiza las categorías de totalidad contradictoria y heterogeneidad desarrolladas por Antonio Cornejo Polar, así como otras categorías postuladas desde el ámbito latinoamericano, para ...tratar de entender la dinámica de la mundialización del sistema literario, no como un proceso lineal de homogeneización, sino como un proceso caracterizado por la transculturación, el multilingüismo, el multiculturalismo, la hibridez y la heterogeneidad, realidad múltiple atravesada por complejos conflictos ideológicos e interculturales, es decir, no solo por la coexistencia en la diversidad, sino por el carácter conflictivo de este proceso. Se cuestiona, asimismo, el concepto de Franco Moretti de "sistema-mundo", y el planteamiento de Pascale Casanova sobre la República Mundial de las letras, por considerar que ambos planteamientos no logran romper con una perspectiva de análisis eurocéntrica.
PDF
