Moretti (2005) Graphs Maps Trees
From Inventiopedia
Moretti, Franco (2005) Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, London and New York: Verso books.
This is a highly interesting work focusing on literary sociology and literary history, from a marxist/materialist perspective - and introducing a method for analyzing geographical relations in literature. The author observes that literary scholars tend to work on
a minimal fraction of the literary field[...]: a canon of two hundred novels, for instance, sounds very large for nineteenth-century Britain (and is much larger than the current one), but is still less than one per cent of the novels that were actually published: twenty thousand, thirty, more, no one really knows (page 4).
In order to make sense of this kind of large materials one needs to make use of abstract models and quantitative measurements, Moretti argues - and among these models is maps.
What do literary maps do... First, they are a good way to prepare a text for analysis. You choose a unit – walks, lawsuits, luxury goods, whatever – find its occurrences, place them in space [...] And with a little luck, these maps will be more than the sum of their parts: they will possess 'emerging' qualities, which were not visible at the lower level. [...] Not that the map is itself an explanation, of course: but at least, it offers a model of the narrative universe which rearranges its components in a non-trivial way, and may bring some hidden patterns to the surface. (page 53)
Studying works in the genre of "village stories", from nineteenth-century England, Scotland and Germany, Moretti uncovers interesting patterns in the way the authors relate to physical space (the village as the centre of a circular space, rather than a point at a crossroad, a point in the national infrastructural grid) as well as the ideological and phenomenological figures of "the nation" and "the world". Moretti quotes D'Arcy Thompson, observing:
«The form of an object is a "diagram of forces", in this sense, at least, that from it we can... deduce the forces that... have acted upon it.» Deducing from the form of an object the forces that have been at work: this is the most elegant definition ever of what literary sociology should be. (page 57)
