Several nonfiction books are reviewed, including Republic of Outsiders: The Power of Amateurs, Dreamers and Rebels by Alissa Quart and Distant Reading by Franco Moretti.
Minds over matter Ziauddin Sardar
New Statesman,
04/2006, Letnik:
19, Številka:
907
Book Review
The third problem that radical thought faces is irrelevance - which brings me to Slavoj i ek. Much of what thinkers of this sort have to say has little relevance to the non-western world: that is to ...say, the vast majority of humanity.
Novel writing develops through a Darwinian process, he says, a process that is not consciously controlled by authors or readers, and not controlled at all by academics. The "blind canon-maker," ...Moretti's variant on the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins' term "blind watchmaker," signifies a force of natural selection that favours some books, and slays the rest. Moretti's study and analysis of the mystery stories of that time yielded two important observations: "First, that quite a few of Conan Doyle's rivals use no clues at all; second, that these writers are all completely forgotten." Meanwhile, the Sherlock Holmes stories hold their place in today's literary canon. In an interview, Moretti said that the Conan Doyle example is illustrative, but not typical. "All of my piece is organized around just one very simple concept, the use of clues. One can argue reasonably that detective fiction can be reduced to this one device," he said. "But in this respect, detective fiction is not the norm of literary genres. Other genres are more complicated, and cannot be reduced to one device. I suspect that the general principle is similar, but the picture is going to get more complicated. It's not just going to be presence or absence of one quality. It's going to be more like clusters of qualities."
