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Far Country
A dazzling account of the development of American cultural hegemony from one of the world's leading literary theorists. Franco Moretti, acclaimed author of Graphs, Maps, Trees and Distant Reading , distils a lifetime of teaching and research to present the university, in the form of an essay. Ranging from poetry and the novel to theatre and the visual arts, Far Country juxtaposes canonical figures in American art and letters with European counterparts Whitman and Baudelaire, Hemingway and Joyce, Miller and Brecht, Hopper and Vermeer charting ruptures in the medium of form that have transformed the cultural landscape on either side of the Atlantic over the past century or more, as the how, why and what for of literature react to the discord of social life.
144 pages, Hardcover
First published January 15, 2019
About the author
Franco Moretti
49 books104 followersFranco Moretti is an Italian literary scholar, trained as a Marxist critic, whose work focuses on the history of the novel as a "planetary form". He has written five books, Signs Taken for Wonders (1983), The Way of the World (1987), Modern Epic (1995), Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 (1998), and Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (2005). His recent work is notable for importing, not without controversy, quantitative methods from the social sciences into domains that have traditionally belonged to the humanities. To date, his books have been translated into fifteen languages.
Moretti has recently edited a five-volume encyclopedia of the novel, entitled Il Romanzo (2004), featuring articles by a wide range of experts on the genre from around the world. It is available in a two-volume English language edition (Princeton UP, 2006).
Moretti earned his doctorate in modern literature from the University of Rome in 1972, graduating summa cum laude. He was professor of comparative literature at Columbia University before being appointed to the Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professorship at Stanford University. There, he founded the Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel. He has given the Carpenter Lectures at the University of Chicago, the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton, and the Beckman Lectures at the University of California-Berkeley. In 2006, he was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also has been a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a frequent contributor to the New Left Review and a member of Retort, a Bay Area-based group of radical intellectuals. He is also a scientific adviser to the French Ministry of Research.
Moretti has recently edited a five-volume encyclopedia of the novel, entitled Il Romanzo (2004), featuring articles by a wide range of experts on the genre from around the world. It is available in a two-volume English language edition (Princeton UP, 2006).
Moretti earned his doctorate in modern literature from the University of Rome in 1972, graduating summa cum laude. He was professor of comparative literature at Columbia University before being appointed to the Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professorship at Stanford University. There, he founded the Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel. He has given the Carpenter Lectures at the University of Chicago, the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton, and the Beckman Lectures at the University of California-Berkeley. In 2006, he was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also has been a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a frequent contributor to the New Left Review and a member of Retort, a Bay Area-based group of radical intellectuals. He is also a scientific adviser to the French Ministry of Research.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
April 20, 2019
Uno di quei libri che fa tornare la voglia di studiare, di quei volumi che ti fanno ben sperare per la nostra istruzione finché persone come Moretti insegnano.
5 lezioni tratte da un ben più lungo e dettagliato corso dedicato alle basi della cultura americana. Si parla di cultura, cinema, società, letteratura e molto altro e lo si fa con precisione, competenza ma anche con grande capacità e voglia di condividere e istruire.
5 lezioni perfette anche per chi è digiuno di storia e letteratura americana.
5 lezioni davvero per tutti.
5 lezioni da 5 stelle.
5 lezioni tratte da un ben più lungo e dettagliato corso dedicato alle basi della cultura americana. Si parla di cultura, cinema, società, letteratura e molto altro e lo si fa con precisione, competenza ma anche con grande capacità e voglia di condividere e istruire.
5 lezioni perfette anche per chi è digiuno di storia e letteratura americana.
5 lezioni davvero per tutti.
5 lezioni da 5 stelle.
December 28, 2022
Such a interesting book on modern (American) culture through the lens of selected poems, proses, films, drama, and paintings.
I seldom purchase books from authors I had never heard of in bookstore. But when I did, they were often good surprises, like this one! Maybe in 2023, I should be more adventurous on reading :)
I seldom purchase books from authors I had never heard of in bookstore. But when I did, they were often good surprises, like this one! Maybe in 2023, I should be more adventurous on reading :)
June 19, 2019
This short book is a selection of lectures from a course in literary history that Franco Moretti, now retired, used to teach at Stanford University. Moretti is best known for advocating computational approaches to the humanities—for his paradigm of "distant reading," where the scholar or team of scholars mine data rather than perform minute and partly artistic close textual analyses to make discoveries or confirm observations about literary form and history.
Disdaining the old technique of close reading as "theological," the materialist Moretti argues instead that the production of literary knowledge should be put on the same basis as scientific knowledge: results should be falsifiable and replicable through experiment.
Such arguments do not appear in Far Country. This collection of undergraduate lectures on topics in American culture—encompassing poetry (Whitman), short fiction (Hemingway), film (Westerns and noirs), drama (Arthur Miller), and painting (Hopper and Warhol)—is a good reminder of where Moretti started as a critic, before his turn to the digital humanities.
His early book, Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms (1983), introduced his method of formalist Marxism by applying it to a range of cultural materials from mass to elite productions, from detective and romance stories to Ulysses and The Waste Land. The best remembered essay today, "Dialectic of Fear," compares Frankenstein to Dracula as novels representing the two extremist threats to an "organic" bourgeois society—the monster's proletarian insurgency and the vampire's monopoly capital.
This type of analysis represents Moretti's foundational technique: he isolates a formal feature of the text—here the creatures who stalk the two horror novels considered as psychological and political metaphors—and finds how it functions in society—in the case of Shelley's and Stoker's books, by winning the reader's assent to liberal capitalism by scaring them with figurations of its alternatives, proletarian revolution or monopolistic centralization.
Rejecting theories that see literature or popular culture as subversive, Moretti argues that literary form usually acts as a safety valve to drain fear and frustration from the capitalist system or that it models, in its aesthetic order, the accommodations the system demands of us. Moretti holds a bleakly and proudly disenchanted view of art as subtle propaganda, a set of intricate formal structures serving the social order, though we encounter them disguised as bewitchingly magical objects that relieve us of the order's strictures. Moretti ends the long introductory essay of Signs Taken for Wonders, "The Soul and the Harpy," by explicating its titular image:
Given the implications of this image, it's no wonder Moretti is averse to close reading: the critic as ensorcelled boy, about to be rent and devoured by the claws—implicitly, the vagina dentata—of his mother-lover, the text, unless he can break the spell by which she has solicited his trust and desire. The critic as monster-slayer, as the iconoclast-liberator of humanity enslaved to oppression by its deluded love of art.
Except that humanity—or its undergraduates, anyway—no longer loves art. Moretti explains in the first chapter of Far Country that, with the diminution in respect contemporary society accords to literature and culture, and with students increasingly concerned with economic opportunity rather than cultural growth as the purpose of their education, he had to re-enchant the objects of his study in his Stanford lectures before dispelling their mystique. This suits him anyway, he explains, because he is drawn equally to the spurious magic and its rational exposure (the harpy really is beautiful, but you must also look down at her monstrous lower half):
Far Country is elegiac, a memorial to Moretti's teaching career, which began at a deprived public university in Salerno, Italy, where the students were mostly working-class and provincial, and ended at elite Stanford—but in neither institution, Moretti explains, did his students know much about literary history, hence the need for survey lecture courses to explain the evolution of cultural forms in tandem with social, political, and economic developments.
Moretti reproduces five of these lectures, in all their conversational and argumentative rhythm, in Far Country—the chapters are divided into labeled paragraphs that today would be the basis for PowerPoint slides. While Moretti's literary history course covered modern European and American culture, the American examples are isolated in this book to further memorialize not only Moretti's pedagogy, but the Italian scholar's life abroad.
Yet in its subtextual attitude toward American culture, Far Country presents the U.S. as yet another harpy whose clutches the soul of the critic is lucky to escape. Moretti organizes almost every chapter around an explicit or implicit comparison between American and European artists, and he always insinuates a preference for the European behind a superficial even-handedness:
Whitman's demotic epic is an empty celebration of manifest destiny as opposed to Baudelaire's radical alienation from capitalist modernity; in "Big Two-Hearted River," Hemingway simplifies Joyce's and (honorary European) Stein's great experimental prose to create a style he can use to hide from the traumas of the Great War; Arthur Miller adopts crowd-pleasing melodrama to evade his most stringent Brechtian insights into the impersonality of capitalist tragedy in Death of a Salesman; Vermeer and Rembrandt create a bourgeois world of subtle interiority, while Hopper and Warhol more crassly succumb to the progressive defeat of humanity by alienation and commodification. Even in popular cinema, the paradigmatically American Western genre dazzles postwar European audiences themselves by legitimizing violence through a schematic portrayal of good vs. evil in a rudimentary society, as opposed to the endless complications of Euro-inflected noir plots and their erupting sexuality that frustrates the profit motive.
This debunking technique is, as we have seen, the essence of Moretti's criticism. Insofar as American art is more immediately appealing than European, precisely because, from Whitman's parataxis to the Western's panoramic landscape shots, it mightily oversimplifies both form and politics, then it is even more urgent to expose its imposture than it is to clarify European literature's more refined techniques of capitalist legitimation. Baudelaire's Gothicized, decadent cityscape may not incite us to revolutionary fervor any more than will Whitman's all-embracing catalogues of American enterprise, but at least we come away from Baudelaire with the sense that capitalism is frightening.
What surely dazzles students more than anything is not simply that Moretti reads politics into literature but that he reads politics into minute features of literary and artistic form, such as Hemingway's use of prepositions or Arthur Miller's non-communicative dialogue. He does this because form is how art imposes ideology on reality, as he explains in his first chapter:
Put this image together with the one about the harpy above and you get a complete picture of the conflict Moretti stages over and over again in his criticism: the artist has through force compelled chaotic reality to assume a pleasing shape to enchant and mislead the audience; the critic, via the counter-force of skeptical rationality, disarticulates this form and restores reason, so that reality may be apprehended without the emotional distraction of art.
But Moretti's plot of form as force leaves out of the scenario an element of the creative process that every artist experiences. So quick is he to masculinize artist and critic as rational agents contending with and over formless female flux that he elides—perhaps because it is construed as effeminate—the moment of passivity, receptivity, through which artist and critic apprehend phenomena before recreating them. Understandably: if you let your guard down, the harpy will carry you away.
But this masculinist elision has critical consequences: it is not only the American artist but Moretti himself who oversimplifies. His rational materialism, his exaltation of science, prevents him almost programmatically from even seeing certain complications in works of literature because he refuses to attend to them as anything other than aggregates of modular formal structures that mimic and uphold capitalism's similarly machinic organization.
Schematically opposing Baudelaire to Whitman as a metonymy for European vs. American approaches to poetry and society, for example, he neglects to inform his students and readers that Baudelaire was inspired by Poe, that the supposedly European vision of modernity he opposes to Whitman's came not from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean but from the same side of the East River (Whitman lived in Brooklyn, Poe in the Bronx). The relation between art and its national context must be less easily explicable than Moretti suggests.
Also, where is Moretti's acknowledgement that there is more to Whitman than boosterism for America's trades? The omnipresence of flesh and death and sexuality—all this, all that makes Whitman still compelling rather than a curio from America's expansionist age, is missing from Moretti's analysis, because it would interfere with the mission of making us outgrow our childish attachment to mother-art and her smothering love. His goal, in a word:
And criticism is work in turn: the counter-mastery of taking masterpieces apart. There's one problem with this theory, though: masterpieces are miracles, or else everyone would write them all the time. And they are products not of superior intelligence—I have no doubt that Moretti is much smarter and more learned than Walt Whitman or Arthur Miller—but of more thoroughgoing openness to reality.
Artistic forms, when they are successful and inventive, are not rational calculations willfully carved into chaos; they are rather the products of inspiration and intuition as much as of deliberation, the willingness to be provoked by experience—and not only that of the economic order: there are more things in heaven and earth, etc.—into the generation of more objects to experience more richly.
Refusing to distinguish between art and propaganda and refusing to acknowledge that the greatest work is infinitely complex in form and and infinitely unpredictable in influence, Moretti leaves us with a vision of the world that excludes half of it: all power, no beauty; all matter, no spirit. And I would hesitate to say this if Moretti were not himself such a believer in homologies between the aesthetic and the social, but an ideology where force alone is real and receptivity and mutuality—love, in a word—a weak myth may have its baleful effects not only on literary criticism but also on the private life.
At the end of his introduction to Far Country, Moretti laments the neoliberal university, where students are merely consumers and education serves only economic rationality. Yet what does he offer in its place? Criticism reduced to technique without the element of creative agency that always made it an art as well as a science, art itself redefined as social mechanism to be defused by the student and teacher. Everything is made rational and assessed for predictable functioning; no object or discourse is left standing that could model complexity that is not chaos and order that is not imposition.
Thinking to slay monsters, Moretti and his science-envying ideology-critiquing cohort only destroyed everything—art, love, beauty—that stood between the university and the machine. If only he had heeded Walt Whitman, who extols the art of participatory passivity rather than the sciences of cold calculation and brute force:
Now the scholar finds himself in the loveless grip not of a harpy, but of the very mechanism he thought would save him from the feminine wiles of great literature.
Disdaining the old technique of close reading as "theological," the materialist Moretti argues instead that the production of literary knowledge should be put on the same basis as scientific knowledge: results should be falsifiable and replicable through experiment.
Such arguments do not appear in Far Country. This collection of undergraduate lectures on topics in American culture—encompassing poetry (Whitman), short fiction (Hemingway), film (Westerns and noirs), drama (Arthur Miller), and painting (Hopper and Warhol)—is a good reminder of where Moretti started as a critic, before his turn to the digital humanities.
His early book, Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms (1983), introduced his method of formalist Marxism by applying it to a range of cultural materials from mass to elite productions, from detective and romance stories to Ulysses and The Waste Land. The best remembered essay today, "Dialectic of Fear," compares Frankenstein to Dracula as novels representing the two extremist threats to an "organic" bourgeois society—the monster's proletarian insurgency and the vampire's monopoly capital.
This type of analysis represents Moretti's foundational technique: he isolates a formal feature of the text—here the creatures who stalk the two horror novels considered as psychological and political metaphors—and finds how it functions in society—in the case of Shelley's and Stoker's books, by winning the reader's assent to liberal capitalism by scaring them with figurations of its alternatives, proletarian revolution or monopolistic centralization.
Rejecting theories that see literature or popular culture as subversive, Moretti argues that literary form usually acts as a safety valve to drain fear and frustration from the capitalist system or that it models, in its aesthetic order, the accommodations the system demands of us. Moretti holds a bleakly and proudly disenchanted view of art as subtle propaganda, a set of intricate formal structures serving the social order, though we encounter them disguised as bewitchingly magical objects that relieve us of the order's strictures. Moretti ends the long introductory essay of Signs Taken for Wonders, "The Soul and the Harpy," by explicating its titular image:
If so undeconstructive and unliberating a notion of literature still seems disagreeable, or unconvincing, I can only draw on an image that has often come back to me in the course of this study. It is a bas-relief of an ancient Greek tomb in the British Museum. It shows a harpy—the upper half of its body a woman, the lower a bird of prey—carrying off a small human body: according to the experts, the soul of the deceased. Below, the harpy is clutching the soul tight in its claws, but higher up her Greek arms are holding her in an attentive and tender embrace. The soul is doing nothing to get out of the harpy’s clutch. It seems calm, relaxed even. It probably does not like being dead: if it did there would be no need for harpies. But at the same time the soul must know that there is no escape from the grip of the claws. For this reason it does not lower its gaze, but rests its head trustingly on the harpy’s arms. Precisely because there is no escape it prefers to delude itself about the affectionate, almost maternal nature of the creature dragging it away with her in flight.
Given the implications of this image, it's no wonder Moretti is averse to close reading: the critic as ensorcelled boy, about to be rent and devoured by the claws—implicitly, the vagina dentata—of his mother-lover, the text, unless he can break the spell by which she has solicited his trust and desire. The critic as monster-slayer, as the iconoclast-liberator of humanity enslaved to oppression by its deluded love of art.
Except that humanity—or its undergraduates, anyway—no longer loves art. Moretti explains in the first chapter of Far Country that, with the diminution in respect contemporary society accords to literature and culture, and with students increasingly concerned with economic opportunity rather than cultural growth as the purpose of their education, he had to re-enchant the objects of his study in his Stanford lectures before dispelling their mystique. This suits him anyway, he explains, because he is drawn equally to the spurious magic and its rational exposure (the harpy really is beautiful, but you must also look down at her monstrous lower half):
There are scholars for whom only the love for literature matters; others, who approve only of the unmasking. More ambivalently, I care about both: radical critique is necessary precisely because of the magic of which literature is capable. Enjoy all the magic, and then filter it through the skepticism of critique: this, for me, is aesthetic education.
Far Country is elegiac, a memorial to Moretti's teaching career, which began at a deprived public university in Salerno, Italy, where the students were mostly working-class and provincial, and ended at elite Stanford—but in neither institution, Moretti explains, did his students know much about literary history, hence the need for survey lecture courses to explain the evolution of cultural forms in tandem with social, political, and economic developments.
Moretti reproduces five of these lectures, in all their conversational and argumentative rhythm, in Far Country—the chapters are divided into labeled paragraphs that today would be the basis for PowerPoint slides. While Moretti's literary history course covered modern European and American culture, the American examples are isolated in this book to further memorialize not only Moretti's pedagogy, but the Italian scholar's life abroad.
Yet in its subtextual attitude toward American culture, Far Country presents the U.S. as yet another harpy whose clutches the soul of the critic is lucky to escape. Moretti organizes almost every chapter around an explicit or implicit comparison between American and European artists, and he always insinuates a preference for the European behind a superficial even-handedness:
Whitman's demotic epic is an empty celebration of manifest destiny as opposed to Baudelaire's radical alienation from capitalist modernity; in "Big Two-Hearted River," Hemingway simplifies Joyce's and (honorary European) Stein's great experimental prose to create a style he can use to hide from the traumas of the Great War; Arthur Miller adopts crowd-pleasing melodrama to evade his most stringent Brechtian insights into the impersonality of capitalist tragedy in Death of a Salesman; Vermeer and Rembrandt create a bourgeois world of subtle interiority, while Hopper and Warhol more crassly succumb to the progressive defeat of humanity by alienation and commodification. Even in popular cinema, the paradigmatically American Western genre dazzles postwar European audiences themselves by legitimizing violence through a schematic portrayal of good vs. evil in a rudimentary society, as opposed to the endless complications of Euro-inflected noir plots and their erupting sexuality that frustrates the profit motive.
This debunking technique is, as we have seen, the essence of Moretti's criticism. Insofar as American art is more immediately appealing than European, precisely because, from Whitman's parataxis to the Western's panoramic landscape shots, it mightily oversimplifies both form and politics, then it is even more urgent to expose its imposture than it is to clarify European literature's more refined techniques of capitalist legitimation. Baudelaire's Gothicized, decadent cityscape may not incite us to revolutionary fervor any more than will Whitman's all-embracing catalogues of American enterprise, but at least we come away from Baudelaire with the sense that capitalism is frightening.
What surely dazzles students more than anything is not simply that Moretti reads politics into literature but that he reads politics into minute features of literary and artistic form, such as Hemingway's use of prepositions or Arthur Miller's non-communicative dialogue. He does this because form is how art imposes ideology on reality, as he explains in his first chapter:
Faced with the incessant turmoil of the empirical world, artistic form operates a selection of the materials to be represented, and fixes them into a structure; and it does so through an agonistic process: anti-chaotic [...] It's the Realpolitik of form: the gray zone where beauty comes into contact with power, and even with violence. "We both like working with hard materials," says Ibsen's last hero, the sculptor Rubek, to, of all people, a bear hunter: "and both of us force our material down under control at last. Become lord and master over it. We never give up till we overcome it, no matter how much it fights back." Force, master, control.
Put this image together with the one about the harpy above and you get a complete picture of the conflict Moretti stages over and over again in his criticism: the artist has through force compelled chaotic reality to assume a pleasing shape to enchant and mislead the audience; the critic, via the counter-force of skeptical rationality, disarticulates this form and restores reason, so that reality may be apprehended without the emotional distraction of art.
But Moretti's plot of form as force leaves out of the scenario an element of the creative process that every artist experiences. So quick is he to masculinize artist and critic as rational agents contending with and over formless female flux that he elides—perhaps because it is construed as effeminate—the moment of passivity, receptivity, through which artist and critic apprehend phenomena before recreating them. Understandably: if you let your guard down, the harpy will carry you away.
But this masculinist elision has critical consequences: it is not only the American artist but Moretti himself who oversimplifies. His rational materialism, his exaltation of science, prevents him almost programmatically from even seeing certain complications in works of literature because he refuses to attend to them as anything other than aggregates of modular formal structures that mimic and uphold capitalism's similarly machinic organization.
Schematically opposing Baudelaire to Whitman as a metonymy for European vs. American approaches to poetry and society, for example, he neglects to inform his students and readers that Baudelaire was inspired by Poe, that the supposedly European vision of modernity he opposes to Whitman's came not from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean but from the same side of the East River (Whitman lived in Brooklyn, Poe in the Bronx). The relation between art and its national context must be less easily explicable than Moretti suggests.
Also, where is Moretti's acknowledgement that there is more to Whitman than boosterism for America's trades? The omnipresence of flesh and death and sexuality—all this, all that makes Whitman still compelling rather than a curio from America's expansionist age, is missing from Moretti's analysis, because it would interfere with the mission of making us outgrow our childish attachment to mother-art and her smothering love. His goal, in a word:
Desacralization: masterpieces are not miracles, they are work: many disparate elements, intricately put together.
And criticism is work in turn: the counter-mastery of taking masterpieces apart. There's one problem with this theory, though: masterpieces are miracles, or else everyone would write them all the time. And they are products not of superior intelligence—I have no doubt that Moretti is much smarter and more learned than Walt Whitman or Arthur Miller—but of more thoroughgoing openness to reality.
Artistic forms, when they are successful and inventive, are not rational calculations willfully carved into chaos; they are rather the products of inspiration and intuition as much as of deliberation, the willingness to be provoked by experience—and not only that of the economic order: there are more things in heaven and earth, etc.—into the generation of more objects to experience more richly.
Refusing to distinguish between art and propaganda and refusing to acknowledge that the greatest work is infinitely complex in form and and infinitely unpredictable in influence, Moretti leaves us with a vision of the world that excludes half of it: all power, no beauty; all matter, no spirit. And I would hesitate to say this if Moretti were not himself such a believer in homologies between the aesthetic and the social, but an ideology where force alone is real and receptivity and mutuality—love, in a word—a weak myth may have its baleful effects not only on literary criticism but also on the private life.
At the end of his introduction to Far Country, Moretti laments the neoliberal university, where students are merely consumers and education serves only economic rationality. Yet what does he offer in its place? Criticism reduced to technique without the element of creative agency that always made it an art as well as a science, art itself redefined as social mechanism to be defused by the student and teacher. Everything is made rational and assessed for predictable functioning; no object or discourse is left standing that could model complexity that is not chaos and order that is not imposition.
Thinking to slay monsters, Moretti and his science-envying ideology-critiquing cohort only destroyed everything—art, love, beauty—that stood between the university and the machine. If only he had heeded Walt Whitman, who extols the art of participatory passivity rather than the sciences of cold calculation and brute force:
Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looks with its sidecurved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it.
Now the scholar finds himself in the loveless grip not of a harpy, but of the very mechanism he thought would save him from the feminine wiles of great literature.
July 16, 2024
Huh, a few worthwhile insights, but mostly dreck - a lot of Moretti's "analysis" pursued toward self-evident ends - like the chapter he dedicates to demonstrating how Hemingway's clipped, telegraphic style is easier to read than the more experimental prose of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Elsewhere, Whitman's poetic gifts are minimized for their linguistic transparency. What's that? Adorno didn't care for Whitman? Good! - I guess I'm nearing the end of my patience for certain kinds of academic writing.
July 20, 2021
Qualche dispensa del Prof. Moretti
Raccolta un pò leggerina di lezioni universitarie date da Moretti nei suoi anni di insegnamento - l'operazione è interessante come metodo: sezioni focalizzate su singoli artisti americani, contrapposti (in qualche caso) a creatori europei (Walt Whitman vs. Charles Baudelaire; Hemingway; Tennesse Williams; Vermeer vs. Hopper). e l'idea di isolare un "singolo tratto sensibile" dal testo per per analizzarne il funzionamento
Mi sono trovato concorde con l'importanza prevalente data da Moretti alla forma in letteratura e ho molto apprezzato la sua analisi chiara e metodica (specie su Whitman e Baudelaire, forse il capitolo migliore di tutto il testo). Meno omogenea con il resto del libro la sezione sul parallelo tra film western e cinema noir, per quanto interessante sembra un corpo estraneo....
Peccato per l'esilità del testo stesso - tutto sommato non sarebbe stato male aggiungere almeno altre 4-5 lezioni per evitare di lasciare al lettore un vago senso di non sazietà. Molti paralleli simili a quelli proposti da Moretti potrebbero essere discussi: Bob Dylan - Fabrizio de Andrè; Hermann Melville - Thomas Mann; Thomas Pynchon - Georges Perec....
Raccolta un pò leggerina di lezioni universitarie date da Moretti nei suoi anni di insegnamento - l'operazione è interessante come metodo: sezioni focalizzate su singoli artisti americani, contrapposti (in qualche caso) a creatori europei (Walt Whitman vs. Charles Baudelaire; Hemingway; Tennesse Williams; Vermeer vs. Hopper). e l'idea di isolare un "singolo tratto sensibile" dal testo per per analizzarne il funzionamento
Mi sono trovato concorde con l'importanza prevalente data da Moretti alla forma in letteratura e ho molto apprezzato la sua analisi chiara e metodica (specie su Whitman e Baudelaire, forse il capitolo migliore di tutto il testo). Meno omogenea con il resto del libro la sezione sul parallelo tra film western e cinema noir, per quanto interessante sembra un corpo estraneo....
Peccato per l'esilità del testo stesso - tutto sommato non sarebbe stato male aggiungere almeno altre 4-5 lezioni per evitare di lasciare al lettore un vago senso di non sazietà. Molti paralleli simili a quelli proposti da Moretti potrebbero essere discussi: Bob Dylan - Fabrizio de Andrè; Hermann Melville - Thomas Mann; Thomas Pynchon - Georges Perec....
August 7, 2021
Far better than most others, not as good as his own best.
February 27, 2019
Cinque brevi saggi (e un'introduzione) che riguardano letteratura, cinema e pittura americani, anche attraverso il confronto con autori europei. Whitman-Baudelaire, Hemingway e la I guerra mondiale, Western-Noir, Morte di un commesso viaggiatore e Amsterdam-New Amsterdam (Vermeer/Rembrandt-Hopper/Warhol) sono i temi dei cinque saggi.
Il libro origina da lezioni a studenti del primo anno di Letteratura Americana, ed è effettivamente un libro fruibile da quasi tutti. Che a quasi tutti piaccia è un'altra questione. A me ha fatto piacere leggerlo.
Il libro origina da lezioni a studenti del primo anno di Letteratura Americana, ed è effettivamente un libro fruibile da quasi tutti. Che a quasi tutti piaccia è un'altra questione. A me ha fatto piacere leggerlo.
March 19, 2019
I received this book free from NetGalley. The style of this work wasn't really to my taste, but I could see how others would enjoy it. I appreciated the novelty of Moretti's approach to literary history as well as that he kept the informal tone of his lectures intact. Having said that, the lectures could have used reformatting to make them more readable; pages upon pages of block quotations gets exhausting quickly. There's also a hard-to-pin-down difference between conversational essay-writing and conversational lecturing which I think is evident here and not in a good way.
October 3, 2024
Fairly random used bookstore pickup that I really enjoyed. Super accessible even for someone without a background in literary criticism. I'm not sure the introduced thesis is the one that he really works up to - obviously the unifying theme is that he's looking at works of American culture, but the unifying analysis isn't really about what makes them American per se but how they build off of these other influences and fit into the (I guess, again, American) cultural context of their time. The Vermeer/Hopper comparison was so interesting.
June 2, 2019
Moretti is such a important thinker, but I wish he was a better writer so I could recommend his work across the board.
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