January 14, 2004

» The mathematics of literature

Studying Literature by the Numbers

In some ways, Mr. Moretti's quantitative method is simply the latest in a long line of efforts to make literary criticism look more like science. From Russian formalism in the 1920's to New Criticism in the 1950's and structuralism and semiotics in the 1960's and 70's, the discipline's major movements share a desire to portray literature as a system governed by hidden laws and structures whose operations it is the critic's job to reveal. But in its formal renunciation of individual texts â?? and, more provocatively, of reading â?? Mr. Moretti's approach, at least as he sketches it in New Left Review, is conceivably more radical than anything his predecessors dreamed up.