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Annexing the unread: a close reading of “distant reading”

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Abstract

In contemporary debates about World literature, Franco Moretti’s method of enquiry called “distant reading” has attracted considerable attention. Many have hailed it as a genuine method, and many have criticized different aspects of it. This essay tries to provide a close analysis of distant reading, and points out a number of misconceptions in it. Starting by an overview of the current discussions regarding Moretti’s method, the essay makes a detailed scrutiny of some of its practical examples. After illustrating the main problem of his method, i.e. not differentiating between two different kinds of noncanonical literature, few methodological suggestions will be offered to help distant reading avoid the current problematic condition.

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Notes

  1. Cohen uses this term in a more restricted sense than Moretti. For her, the great unread, or as she also calls it, hors d’usage refers to the literary archive. But as we shall see in the following pages, Moretti expands this term to describe the portion of World literature that remains outside the canonical focus.

  2. There are, of course, several other scholars who responded directly to Moretti’s “Conjectures”, but due to space limits, I am not able to review them in detail. See Prendergast (2001), Orsini (2002) and Parla (2004).

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Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank Dr. Albert Braz, University of Alberta, for his meticulous comments and benevolent discussions.

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Correspondence to Amir Khadem.

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Khadem, A. Annexing the unread: a close reading of “distant reading”. Neohelicon 39, 409–421 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-012-0152-y

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