TWO NEW BOOKS BY FRANCO MORETTI
THE BOURGEOIS: BETWEEN HISTORY AND LITERATURE
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Published June 2013
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Who – and what – are the Bourgeois?
“The bourgeois ... Not so long ago, this notion seemed indispensable to social analysis; these days, one might go years without hearing it mentioned. Capitalism is more powerful than ever, but its human embodiment seems to have vanished. ‘I am a member of the bourgeois class, feel myself to be such, and have been brought up on its opinions and ideals,’ wrote Max Weber, in 1895. Who could repeat these words today? Bourgeois ‘opinions and ideals’—what are they?”
Thus begins Franco Moretti’s study of the bourgeois in modern European literature—a major new analysis of the once-dominant culture and its literary decline and fall. Moretti’s gallery of individual portraits is entwined with the analysis of specific keywords—“useful” and “earnest,” “efficiency,” “influence,” “comfort,” “roba”—and of the formal mutations of the medium of prose. From the “working master” of the opening chapter, through the seriousness of nineteenth-century novels, the conservative hegemony of Victorian Britain, the “national malformations” of the Southern and Eastern periphery, and the radical self-critique of Ibsen’s twelve-play cycle, the book charts the vicissitudes of bourgeois culture, exploring the causes for its historical weakness, and for its current irrelevance.
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“The great iconoclast of literary criticism.”
– John Sutherland, Guardian
“It’s a rare literary critic who attracts so much public attention, and there’s a good reason: few are as hellbent on rethinking the way we talk about literature.”
– Times Literary Supplement
“Moretti is already famous in bookish circles for his data-centric approach to novels, which he graphs, maps, and charts ... if his new methods catch on, they could change the way we look at literary history.”
– Wired
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Hardback / ISBN: 9781781680858 / $26.95 / £14.99 / $31.00CAN / 224 Pages
For more information on THE BOURGEOIS: BETWEEN HISTORY AND LITERATURE or to buy the book visit:
http://www.versobooks.com/books/1422-the-bourgeois
DISTANT READING
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Published June 2013
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The formation of an unorthodox literary critic
How does a literary historian end up thinking in terms of z-scores, principal component analysis, and clustering coefficient?
In the ten essays collected in this volume, Franco Moretti reconstructs the intellectual trajectory of his philosophy of ‘distant reading’. From the evolutionary model of ‘Modern European Literature’, through the geo-cultural dominant of ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ and ‘Planet Hollywood’ to the quantitative findings of ‘Style, inc.’ and the abstract patterns of ‘Network Theory, Plot Analysis’, the book follows two decades of critical explorations that have come to define – well beyond the wildest expectations of its author – a growing field of unorthodox literary studies.
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“A great iconoclast of literary criticism.”
– John Sutherland, Guardian
“It’s a rare literary critic who attracts so much public attention, and there’s a good reason: few are as hell-bent on rethinking the way we talk about literature.”
– Times Literary Supplement
“Moretti, a mythopoeic figure, generates around himself a dense network of folklore and apocrypha.”
– n+1
“Moretti is already famous in bookish circles for his data-centric approach to novels, which he graphs, maps, and charts ... if his new methods catch on, they could change the way we look at literary history.”
– Wired
“Distant reading might prove to be a powerful tool for studying literature.”
– New York Times
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Paperback / ISBN: 9781781680841 / $29.95 / £16.99 / $34.95CAN / 254 Pages
Hardback / ISBN: 9781781681121 / $95.00 / £60.00 / $100.00CAN / 224 pages
For More information on DISTANT READING or to buy the book visit:
http://www.versobooks.com/books/1421-distant-reading
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