Graphs Maps Trees review
Feb. 12th, 2008 08:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearIn "Graphs Maps Trees", Franco Moretti takes a quantitative view of literary history, which makes for a very interesting book. As a primarily quant market researcher, and an English graduate with a voracious appetite for reading, it's the perfect book for me.
The graphs section plots the rise and fall of various genres, focusing on the whole universe of certain types of literature rather than the surviving canon people are familiar with - ie 20-30,000 19th century novels, rather than the handful everyone talks about. The maps section looks at the geography books, plotting jourmeys and places over time. The trees section, which was the most interesting, applies a Darwinian theory of social selection to analyse which evolutionary developments in books proved the most successful.
It's a way of looking at book that I'd never considered before, and proved extremely interesting. However, the most interesting aspect of the book is that Moretti freely admits there are holes in his arguments and things that he can't explain - as he states in the last sentence of the book, "Opening new conceptual possibilities seemed more important than justifying them in every detail." It's a brave approach, and one that I can respect.
The graphs section plots the rise and fall of various genres, focusing on the whole universe of certain types of literature rather than the surviving canon people are familiar with - ie 20-30,000 19th century novels, rather than the handful everyone talks about. The maps section looks at the geography books, plotting jourmeys and places over time. The trees section, which was the most interesting, applies a Darwinian theory of social selection to analyse which evolutionary developments in books proved the most successful.
It's a way of looking at book that I'd never considered before, and proved extremely interesting. However, the most interesting aspect of the book is that Moretti freely admits there are holes in his arguments and things that he can't explain - as he states in the last sentence of the book, "Opening new conceptual possibilities seemed more important than justifying them in every detail." It's a brave approach, and one that I can respect.
