I started reading Franco Moretti’s Graphs Maps Trees over the weekend. I was a bit worried it was going to be difficult and perhaps over my head but while I certainly have to pay attention and concentrate and *gasp* think, it isn’t “too hard.” The book is broken into three parts. These were originally lectures so they are fairly short and precisely and clearly written.

I read the section “Graphs” and it was really fascinating. Moretti is attempting to take a different approach to literature, what he calls a “distance reading.” By this he means to step back from studying closely the few stellar novels of a period that almost everyone else is studying and look at the big picture, sort of looking at the forest instead of the trees or possibly the whole ecosystem.

To graph the history of the novel one must step back really far and not even look at the works themselves but take a quantitative and computational approach. With the help of some international colleagues and lots of data about the publication of novels from a variety of countries, Moretti presents the reader with a series of fascinating graphs.

One of the more interesting graphs is of the development of the novel in Britain, Japan, Italy, Spain and Nigeria. What the graph shows is that while the novel developed in each of these countries at different times, the development in each of the countries, based on novels published each year, looks remarkably similar.

Eventually he zooms in on the British novel with the intent to discover if there are cycles in the popularity of genres (Moretti uses genre in a very broad sense, for example, epistolary, gothic and historical are all genres). He turns up some very interesting things such as the duration of popularity of a genre is always about the same length of time no matter the genre. He also discovers there are whole chunks of genres that come and go at about the same time.

The thing about taking a graphical view of the novel like this is that you get lots of marvelous data, lots of numbers, lots of things that make you say, “hmm now doesn’t that look interesting?” But there is no explanation for the numbers; the data gives you a problem but no solution. Far from being terrible, Moretti finds this an exciting prospect and wonders if there isn’t some way academics of literature couldn’t draw up a list of such problems without answers, a sort of literary equivalent to unsolved mathematical equations, to entice researchers into the field. At the very least such an approach has the potential to open up the conversation about literature and literary history from narrow discussions about the romantics or victorians or modernists, to something bigger and potentially just as valuable.

I’ve only managed to skim the froth of Moretti’s ideas in this chapter but I hope I have managed to at least capture a bit of what he is doing. I still have the chapters on maps and trees to read but if they are as good as “Graphs” than I’m going to be suggesting everyone read this book.