written by Franco Moretti
The pamphlet begins, ‘One thing for sure: digitization has completely changed the literary archive. People like me used to work on a few hundred nineteenth- century novels; today, we work on thousands of them; tomorrow, hundreds of thousands. This has had a major effect on literary history, obviously enough, but also on critical methodology; because, when we work on 200,000 novels instead of 200, we are not doing the same thing, 1,000 times bigger; we are doing a different thing. The new scale changes our relationship to our object, and in fact it changes the object itself. “No one has ever seen the objects studied by contemporary historians”, Krzysztof Pomian once wrote, “and no one could ever have seen them [...] because they have no equivalent within lived experience.” True. No one has a lived experience of demographic change, or of literacy rates, or of – Figure 1.1.’
All pamphlets of the Literary Lab can be downloaded at:
https://litlab.stanford.edu/pamphlets/
1. “Quantitative Formalism: An Experiment”
Sarah Allison, Ryan Heuser, Matthew Jockers, Franco Moretti, Michael Witmore
2. “Network Theory, Plot Analysis”
Franco Moretti
3. “Becoming Yourself: The Afterlife of Reception”
Ed Finn
4. “A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method”
Ryan Heuser, Long Le-Khac
5. “Style at the Scale of the Sentence”
Sarah Allison, Marissa Gemma, Ryan Heuser, Franco Moretti, Amir Tevel, Irena Yamboliev
6. “ ‘Operationalizing’: or, the Function of Measurement in Modern Literary Theory”
Franco Moretti
7. “Loudness in the Novel”
Holst Katsma
8. "Between Canon and Corpus: Six Perspectives on 20th-Century Novels”
Mark Algee-Hewitt, Mark McGurl
9. “Bankspeak: The Language of World Bank Reports, 1946-2012”
Franco Moretti, Dominique Pestre
10. “On Paragraphs. Scale, Themes, and Narrative Form”
Mark Algee-Hewitt, Ryan Heuser, Franco Moretti
11. "Canon/Archive. Large-scale Dynamics in the Literary Field”
Mark Algee-Hewitt, Sarah Allison, Marissa Gemma, Ryan Heuser, Franco Moretti, Hannah Walser
12. “Literature, Measured”
Franco Moretti
13. “The Emotions of London"
Ryan Heuser, Franco Moretti, Erik Steiner
14. “Broken Time, Continued Evolution: Anachronies in Contemporary Films”
Maria Kanatova, Alexandra Milyakina, Tatyana Pilipovec, Artjom Shelya, Oleg Sobchuk, Peeter Tinits
15. “Patterns and Interpretation”
Franco Moretti