Graphing Books?

Franco Moretti’s article focuses on a different manner of analyzing literature. Instead of focusing on a specific novel and its effects on the public, Moretti chooses to take a more statistical and analytical approach of collectively analyzing a novels and genres throughout time using graphs.

What Moretti had going for him in his article is that it was straightforward and precise. It presents you with cold, hard facts about the changing nature of novels, which seems a bit hollow considering the argument that Morretti is trying to make. While there is nothing wrong with pursuing a new method of analyzing literature, I personally do not think that Moretti’s method should really be applied in this manner, because I feel that it is very limiting. In one of the graphs Moretti provides us with, he discusses some of the reasons why novels had declines in specific nations during specific times. While Moretti does acknowledge that there could be several factors that affect the publication of novels and declines of specific genres, his research cannot give him the full scope of cultural and social events going on during the time periods he analyzed, especially when novels increased exponentially in popularity. Another issue with analyzing literature in this manner is that in analyzing large chunks of literature like this is that it focuses too much on the mass and not on the individual pieces of work, which can lead to making assumptions and generalizations about some aspects of literature, making parts of the research inconclusive.

In regards to SSTLS, the close analysis that we have been doing feels to me that it is the most effective way of analyzing the novel. With this close analysis, we are able to nitpick at the finer details of the novel, and analyze the various themes that Shteyngart presents to us and why Shteyngart did this and that. Analyzing the book on a broader scale would dampen our abilities to fully develop our understanding of several of the points Shteyngart is trying to get across, such as the somewhat subterfuged messages of racism and sexism. In the end, I think graphs and books do not get along too well.