Graphs, Maps, Trees, and “Great Books”
I am going to do two posts for today, because I don’t want to cram everything into one post.
Moretti’s book is great. I love the idea of being able to look at texts on a large scale and find new patterns. As I was reading, I kept thinking about those great books collections I see in libraries. What makes them great? What happened to other books of their time? If we knew about the other books, would we still consider the ones we’ve labeled “great books” still great?
I realize I am oversimplifying the issue here. First, many of the great books, which probably include Shakespeare, are just great works of literature, regardless of other books of their times. Hamlet is a great play and has beautiful language, regardless of the hundreds of other books that appeared in England at the same time. Second, I am sure that in many cases, such as with Homer, there just were not many other books floating aroun. Of course, Homer is a bad example there, because he was far before books. Nevertheless, it is intriguing how Moretti’s book points to ways of looking at texts that could overturn somewhat sacred cows like the “Great Books Library” or even greater sacred cows like “the cannon of western literature.”
Looking at this in another way, what about books today that have been published online? Which ones are going to be the “great books” of the future? I would assume that your everyday fan fiction about Star Trek or Star Wars would not qualify. One of the possibilities with literature online, probably all of which is born digital now, could be analyzed in the way Moretti analyzes novels. Future historians might look back to the first few decades of the web and see what interesting patters pop up with born digital literature, history, etc. They would find these patterns by looking at a huge collection of books, rather than from close reading of one or two. They will see patters that we do not see today. They also would be able to access their data much more easily than Moretti did with his 19th century novels.
In my next post, I am going to attempt to apply Moretti to some literature.
