Franco Moretti

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Franco Moretti (* 1950 in Sondrio ) is an Italian literary scholar .

Life

Franco Moretti was born in Sondrio in 1950 and received his doctorate from the University of Rome in 1972 with a thesis on the English intellectuals of the 1930s. He did research at the Universities of Pescara and Rome (1972–1979), and was one of the editors of the magazines "calibano" and "Leviatano"; He later taught English and Comparative Literature at the Universities of Salerno (1979–83), Verona (1983–90), Columbia (1990–2000) and Stanford (2000–2016), where he was the Center for Research on the Novel and Stanford Literary Lab founded. In the course of time he was also visiting professor at several universities in Europe and the USA, twice a “Fellow” of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1999/2000, 2012/2013), advisor to the French Ministry of Youth and Education, and a member of the “Digital Humanities Institute “of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (2016–2019). He taught the Gaussian Seminars at Princeton, gave the Beckman Lectures at Berkeley, and the Carpenter Lectures at the University of Chicago. The work of this “great iconoclast of literary criticism”, as The Guardian once called him, has been translated into 30 languages ​​and has been the subject of two collections of essays: Reading Graphs, Maps, Trees. Critical Reactions to Franco Moretti (2011) and Lire de près, de loin (2014). The essays collected in the book Distant Reading were awarded the National Book Critics Circle award in 2014, and Andreas Bernard praised Moretti's book as "the most interesting literary theoretical book that has appeared in many years" in his review .

In 2017, a woman accused Moretti in a Facebook post of sexually assaulting her in 1985. He denied the allegation, saying the relationship was entirely consensual. A little later, two women claimed to have been molested by Moretti in the 1990s; both allegations were denied by Moretti. No formal proceedings were ever opened against him. A Stanford spokesman said the university is studying the case and "determining if there is any action for Stanford to take". However, such measures were never taken.

Moretti is currently Emeritus Professor at Stanford University, “Permanent Fellow” at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Scientific Advisory Board of the “Institute for World Literature” at Harvard University. He is a regular contributor to the New Left Review , and continues to give lectures and courses in various countries. His latest book - Far Country. Scenes from American Culture , which was published simultaneously in Italy and the USA in 2019, and which was published in Germany in 2020 as Ein Fernes Land - is framed by a long reflection on his first and last university course (1979-2016) and is at the same time an analysis of American pop culture.

The film director Nanni Moretti is his brother. With this he made two short films Pâté de bourgeois and La sconfitta in 1973 and the feature film Io sono un autarchico in 1976 . His father is the ancient historian Luigi Moretti .

In 2006 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2009 to the American Philosophical Society .

Scientific work

The great bourgeois tradition

A central research focus of Moretti is the analysis of bourgeois culture, on which he first published The Way of the World in 1987 . The book presents the European Bildungsroman as the symbolic form that enabled nineteenth-century reading audiences to understand and cope with the political and economic upheavals of the era. In Modern Epic (1996) he extends the panorama to include Faust and Moby-Dick , Wagner's Ring , Joyce's Ulysses and the masterpieces of Latin American magical realism. Twenty years later, The Bourgeois (2013; in German 2016 as Der Bourgeois ) completed this trilogy of modern existence with a detailed analysis of bourgeois keywords (“useful”, “comfort”, “efficiency”, “serious” etc.) and the metamorphoses of the “ prosaic “culture from Defoe to Ibsen and Max Weber.


Geography, Novel and Comparative Literature

In the 1990s, Moretti opened the new field of research in literary geography with his Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (1998), which has been closely associated with his name ever since. Geography was also the starting point for “Conjectures on World Literature” (2000), an essay that - together with Pascale Casanova's La Republique Mondiale des Lettres - polemically formulates a new model for comparative literature based on the historical writings of Braudel and Wallerstein. Between 2001 and 2003, Moretti was editor of the five volumes of Einaudi's Il Romanzo (translated into English by Princeton University Press in 2007): a collective work that seeks to redraw the spatial, historical and aesthetic map of this literary form. Two hundred scientists from all over the world were involved. a. Beatriz Sarlo and Rossana Rossanda, I-heng Zhao and Umberto Eco, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Ann Banfield, and Claudio Magris.


"Distant Reading"

Over time, Moretti has coined a number of crucial core concepts for literary research, of which “ distant reading ” is the best known. The idea of ​​looking at culture from a distance ultimately led Moretti to the quantitative approach developed in the "Pamphlets" published by the Stanford Literary Lab, and among others. a. in German in the collection Literatur im Labor . The creation of a literary "laboratory" aroused both support and resistance as it introduced a way of working within the humanities - a "new critical paradigm" as the New Yorker called it - that had long been reserved for the natural sciences.

Publications (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Center for the Study of the Novel. Retrieved February 16, 2020 (American English).
  2. ^ Stanford Literary Lab - Director: Mark Algee-Hewitt. Retrieved February 16, 2020 (American English).
  3. ^ John Sutherland: The ideas interview: Franco Moretti . In: The Guardian . January 9, 2006, ISSN  0261-3077 ( theguardian.com [accessed February 16, 2020]).
  4. ↑ https://www.parlorpress.com/pdf/ReadingMapsGraphsTrees.pdf
  5. ↑ Lire de près, de loin Close vs distant reading (=  Théorie littéraire, n ° 3 in Rencontres ). Classiques Garnier, Paris 2014, ISBN 978-2-8124-2124-2 ( classiques-garnier.com [accessed February 16, 2020]).
  6. ^ National Book Critics Circle: National Book Critics Circle Announces Award Winners for Publishing Year 2013 - Critical Mass Blog. Accessed February 16, 2020 .
  7. ↑ Retired English professor accused of sexual assault by former graduate student. In: The Stanford Daily. November 10, 2017, accessed February 16, 2020 .
  8. ↑ Caitlin Dickerson, Stephanie Saul: Two Colleges Bound by History Are Roiled by the #MeToo Moment . In: The New York Times . December 2, 2017, ISSN  0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed February 16, 2020]).
  9. ^ A Full Investigation Is Needed Into the Sexual Assault Allegations Against Brett Kavanaugh. Accessed February 16, 2020 .
  10. ↑ Harini Shyamsundar, Ashley Wong: Former UC Berkeley visiting professor accused of sex assault by then-student. November 10, 2017, accessed February 16, 2020 (American English).
  11. ^ Franco Moretti | Department of English. Accessed February 16, 2020 .
  12. ^ Franco Moretti, Permanent Fellow. Retrieved February 16, 2020 .
  13. ↑ FAR COUNTRY | Kirkus Reviews . ( kirkusreviews.com [accessed February 16, 2020]).
  14. ^ Lothar Müller: High Noon . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . No. 193 . Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH, Munich August 22, 2020, p. 18 .
  15. ^ Member History: Franco Moretti. American Philosophical Society, accessed January 8, 2019 .
  16. ↑ Michal P. Ginsburg: The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture by Franco Moretti . In: Comparative Literature Studies . tape 27 , no. 1 , 1990, ISSN  0010-4132 , pp. 79–84 ( northwestern.edu [accessed February 16, 2020]).
  17. ^ The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature by Franco Moretti. June 27, 2013, accessed February 16, 2020 .
  18. ^ The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature by Franco Moretti. June 27, 2013, accessed February 16, 2020 .
  19. ↑ Alexander Cammann: The Bourgeois: Working instead of celebrating . In: The time . December 11, 2014, ISSN  0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed February 16, 2020]).
  20. ↑ Review: Non-fiction book: Search for traces . In: FAZ.NET . ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed February 16, 2020]).
  21. ↑ Christopher Prendergast: By the Width of a Street · LRB October 29, 1998. October 29, 1998, accessed on February 16, 2020 (English).
  22. ^ Makers of maps - Literary criticism. In: TLS. Retrieved February 16, 2020 (UK English).
  23. ^ Franco Moretti, Conjectures on World Literature, NLR 1, January – February 2000. Retrieved February 16, 2020 (English).
  24. ^ Il romanzo I. La cultura del romanzo, VV .. Giulio Einaudi Editore - Grandi Opere. In: Einaudi. Retrieved February 16, 2020 (it-IT).
  25. ↑ David Trotter: Into the Future · LRB 22 March 2007. 22 March 2007, accessed on 16 February 2020 (English).
  26. ↑ Kathryn Schulz: What Is Distant Reading? In: The New York Times . June 24, 2011, ISSN  0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed February 16, 2020]).
  27. ^ Distant reading in Russia: Franco Moretti and the formalist tradition. Accessed February 16, 2020 .
  28. ^ Ruben Hackler, Guido Kirsten: Distant Reading, Computational Criticism, and Social Critique: An Interview with Franco Moretti . In: Le foucaldien . tape 2 , no. 1 , May 16, 2016, ISSN  2515-2076 , p. 7 , doi : 10.16995 / lefou.22 ( foucaldien.net [accessed February 16, 2020]).
  29. ↑ https://foucaldien.net/articles/abstract/10.16995/lefou.22/
  30. ^ Literature - a case for the statistician . In: FAZ.NET . ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed February 16, 2020]).
  31. ^ Franco Moretti: Literature in the Laboratory - Konstanz University Press. Accessed February 16, 2020 .
  32. ^ Par Marion Renauld: Humanités Numériques. In: En attendant Nadeau. December 20, 2016, accessed on February 16, 2020 (Fri-FR).
  33. ^ Joshua Rothman: An Attempt to Discover the Laws of Literature. Retrieved February 16, 2020 .
  34. ↑ Jennifer Schuessler: Reading by the Numbers: When Big Data Meets Literature . In: The New York Times . October 30, 2017, ISSN  0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed February 16, 2020]).
personal data
SURNAME Moretti, Franco
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian literary scholar
DATE OF BIRTH 1950
PLACE OF BIRTH Sondrio