Experimental Criticism

Experimental Criticism provides a series of close critical engagements with Franco Moretti. One of the world's most innovative literary thinkers, Moretti may be best known for his 'distant reading' of vast numbers of literary texts at the Stanford Literary Lab. Francesco de Cristofaro and Stefano Ercolino lead a lively exploration of his work as a springboard for rethinking the fundamentals of literary theory. Topics include world literature and the Digital Humanities, literary morphology and evolutionary theory, the sociology of literature, and Marxism and literary history. A concluding section is dedicated to the novel, one of Moretti's most prized research objects. Experimental Criticism reconstructs Moretti's intellectual journey, from origins on the Italian Trotskyist Left to the project for a historical atlas of literature and later computational turn. The collection includes essays from Moretti himself on Lukcs's Theory of the Novel and the methodological tension between close and distant reading. 'Why study literature?', he asks. For the pleasure of reducing complex things to their simple elements; to bring them back to earth. "A sheer intelligence animates the pages of Moretti's work." New York Times "A great iconoclast of literary criticism." Guardian "Few are as hell-bent [as Moretti] on rethinking the way we talk about literature." Times Literary Supplement