Abstract:

Franco Moretti has advocated“distant reading”to promote his concept of“world literature”in recent years. In Atlas of the European Novel：1800-1900, he proposes moving towards a form of literary geography, more precisely, literary cartography. Moretti argues that maps can reveal the hidden connections between geography and literature, allowing readers to see in literature what was previously unseen. His mission to conduct micro-quantitative analysis of literature through maps is obviously influenced by Peirce and Braudel. His typical examples of distant reading include reading Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice through Charles Booth’s map of London, and reading Balzac’s Lost Illusions through Robert Parker’s map of Paris. In Distant Reading, Moretti suggests that distant reading allows readers to focus on units much smaller or larger than the text, such as methods, subjects, rhetorical techniques, or genres and systems. Different from the tradition of“close reading”in Anglo-American literary criticism, distant reading uses quantitative analysis to interpret the interaction of categorical factors and various formal elements within massive text corpora, thereby constructing a kind of“digital humanities.”To a large extent, it can also be seen as a legacy of poststructuralism’s proclamation of the disappearance of the subject.

Key words: Moretti, maps, Lucien Chardon, distant reading, modern novel