Moretti and Graphs

Franco Moretti proposes a new way of studying literature. Instead analyzing specific books and relating them to their time period through personal interpretation, Moretti compiles together graphs from historical facts and data on novels. By analyzing these graphs he is able to see certain patterns and trends literary periods take and speculate on why they happened. This method of analyzing literature would provide less room for bias since it involves analyzing data rather than giving personal opinions about a novel. Graphs make it easier to see how literature has evolved over the years and how it is strongly related to what is going on in society. However this method of analyzing literature is also very broad and generalized. The graphs are easy to look at but many exceptions are looked over.

If data on the literacy rates from the early 1700s to the late 1800s were compiled into a graph, it could be compared to the rise of the novel graph and help predict whether the amount of books published was affected by how many people could read. This can go a step further by splitting the literacy rates to literacy rates of men and women. We can then compare this graph with the gender breakdown new novels graph and see if the rise of novels written by women corresponds to periods where women literacy was higher. We can place inventions and discoveries in science on a graph to see which time period sparked the rise of the genre science fiction.

We can place SSTLS in this scheme of looking at literature by placing its value on literature as a whole. Instead of analyzing the text we can look at where it stands on the different graphs Moretti has created. We can look at what genre it falls under and with what other genres it erupted with to see what generation of readers might be interested in it, or we can look at what genre came before it and speculate why that genre was replaced by SSTLS’s.