Experimental Criticism (Francesco De Cristofaro)

Experimental Criticism provides a series of close critical engagements with Franco Moretti. One of the world's most innovative literary thinkers, Moretti may be best known for his 'distant reading' of vast numbers of literary texts at the Stanford Literary Lab. Francesco de Cristofaro and Stefano Ercolino lead a lively exploration of his work as a springboard for rethinking the fundamentals of literary theory. Topics include world literature and the Digital Humanities, literary morphology and evolutionary theory, the sociology of literature, and Marxism and literary history. A concluding section is dedicated to the novel, one of Moretti's most prized research objects.

Experimental Criticism reconstructs Moretti's intellectual journey, from origins on the Italian Trotskyist Left to the project for a historical atlas of literature and later computational turn. The collection includes essays from Moretti himself on Lukács's Theory of the Novel and the methodological tension between close and distant reading. 'Why study literature?', he asks. For the pleasure of reducing complex things to their simple elements; to bring them back to earth.

"A sheer intelligence animates the pages of Moretti's work."
New York Times

"A great iconoclast of literary criticism."
Guardian

"Few are as hell-bent [as Moretti] on rethinking the way we talk about literature."
Times Literary Supplement

Francesco de Cristofaro teaches comparative literature at the University of Naples Federico II. He is the author of Zoo di romanzi (Zoo of Novels), Letterature comparate (Comparative Literature) and La palla al balzo (Leaping at the Chance). Stefano Ercolino teaches literary theory and comparative literature at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. His books include The Maximalist Novel, The Novel-Essay and, with Massimo Fusillo, Negative Empathy in Literature and the Arts (forthcoming). Franco Moretti is a Professor Emeritus at Stanford, where he founded the Center for the Study of the Novel and the Literary Lab. He writes regularly for New Left Review and is a Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is the author of, among other books, Far Country, The Bourgeois and Graphs, Maps, Trees. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. His book Distant Reading won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

Buch (Paperback), Englisch, 272 Seiten