--- product_id: 9234482 title: "Distant Reading" price: "€ 44.96" currency: EUR in_stock: true reviews_count: 8 url: https://www.desertcart.es/products/9234482-distant-reading store_origin: ES region: Spain --- # Distant Reading **Price:** € 44.96 **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** Distant Reading - **How much does it cost?** € 44.96 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.es](https://www.desertcart.es/products/9234482-distant-reading) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD How does a literary historian end up thinking in terms of z-scores, principal component analysis, and clustering coefficients? The essays in Distant Reading led to a new and often contested paradigm of literary analysis. In presenting them here Franco Moretti reconstructs his intellectual trajectory, the theoretical influences over his work, and explores the polemics that have often developed around his positions. From the evolutionary model of “Modern European Literature,” through the geo-cultural insights of “Conjectures of 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 conceptual development, organizing them around the metaphor of “distant reading,” that has come to define—well beyond the wildest expectations of its author—a growing field of unorthodox literary studies. Review: extended reading - This book is made of 10 essays that attack, from different angles, issues that obsess the author: - the existence of a 'world literature', as a huge set of extremely diverse styles, forms and stories and, later with the globalization, as an organism or system. Franco Moretti speculates on how this system works, what are the mechanisms for new literary production, specially in the clash of the center and the periphery. He uses archetypes and metaphors brought from evolutionary biology, such as diffusion (wave), divergence (tree), confluence (anastomosis),... - the problem for the literary critic theory, that can't access the entire world literature corpus. A critic can only read an extremely tiny percentage of all those books, and usually chooses what is considered canonical, thus leaving outside the "great unread". - the possible solutions to this problem, what he calls 'distant reading', "distance [...] is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text" - the role of the market as an space or environment that shapes literary evolution, genre creation and successful literary artifacts discovery (again, under an evolutionary biology perspective) Among the things that makes this book extremely interesting is the fact that the author wanders through difficult issues, often invalidating or revisiting previous ideas (he's playing, he's inviting to play). For instance, one of the first essays is 'Conjectures on World Literature'; this essay was published and received several critics; another essay in the book, 'More Conjectures' introduces many of these critics, the ones the author reckons as more interesting, he admits he was wrong in some cases, defends other points of views, and the whole feels as a true conversation, a one the author is enjoying. To some extent is like reading an epistolary novel. These conversations: with other critics, with himself, and between essays that constantly return to the same issues, makes the book a system itself, a network. Franco Moretti has been criticized for proposing an approach to books that no longer requires reading (that is: enjoying) books. I think this is just a provocation, a "social artifact" (in his own terms) to get attention to the issues he points. What he actually proposes is an "extended reading", that also requires reading, but that goes beyond by focusing on the small (identifiable artifacts contained in books) and the big (corpora of books that can't be read by a single human). As an example from the book: Moretti analyzes a small subset of detective novels written in a single decade of the XIX century, "The total came to 108 (plus another fifty items or so [...]), and--it took time. But I have read them all". If you thought Moretti doesn't read books... Finally, one virtue Franco Moretti has and is largely exposed in this book, is his ability to make good questions. As he says "the trouble is, we literary scholars are not good at that: we are trained to listen, not to ask questions". An example of one he poses, that might seem strange at first, but that lead to interesting paths of inquiry: why novels are written in prose?. Is already a cliché that a data scientist main skill is to identify (to craft) good questions, that this ability is more important even than the capacity to provide the best answers to already existent problems. In that sense, Moretti is an excellent data scientist. Review: Generally fine, revisionist reading - Generally fine, revisionist reading. Too bad Moretti knows hardly anything about present Latin American narrative, a discussion of which would have gone a long way toward making his arguments more solid and convincing. Having read one canonical novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude does not allow him to pontificate about a whole region. In that regard he is no better than Jameson. Yet, Moretti is not as turgid, and can even throw in a joke. ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #1,052,595 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #90 in Comparative Literature #1,403 in Essays (Books) #1,462 in Literary Criticism & Theory | | Customer Reviews | 3.9 out of 5 stars 36 Reviews | ## Images ![Distant Reading - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91Irrb+BJ+L.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ extended reading *by S***Z on July 24, 2013* This book is made of 10 essays that attack, from different angles, issues that obsess the author: - the existence of a 'world literature', as a huge set of extremely diverse styles, forms and stories and, later with the globalization, as an organism or system. Franco Moretti speculates on how this system works, what are the mechanisms for new literary production, specially in the clash of the center and the periphery. He uses archetypes and metaphors brought from evolutionary biology, such as diffusion (wave), divergence (tree), confluence (anastomosis),... - the problem for the literary critic theory, that can't access the entire world literature corpus. A critic can only read an extremely tiny percentage of all those books, and usually chooses what is considered canonical, thus leaving outside the "great unread". - the possible solutions to this problem, what he calls 'distant reading', "distance [...] is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text" - the role of the market as an space or environment that shapes literary evolution, genre creation and successful literary artifacts discovery (again, under an evolutionary biology perspective) Among the things that makes this book extremely interesting is the fact that the author wanders through difficult issues, often invalidating or revisiting previous ideas (he's playing, he's inviting to play). For instance, one of the first essays is 'Conjectures on World Literature'; this essay was published and received several critics; another essay in the book, 'More Conjectures' introduces many of these critics, the ones the author reckons as more interesting, he admits he was wrong in some cases, defends other points of views, and the whole feels as a true conversation, a one the author is enjoying. To some extent is like reading an epistolary novel. These conversations: with other critics, with himself, and between essays that constantly return to the same issues, makes the book a system itself, a network. Franco Moretti has been criticized for proposing an approach to books that no longer requires reading (that is: enjoying) books. I think this is just a provocation, a "social artifact" (in his own terms) to get attention to the issues he points. What he actually proposes is an "extended reading", that also requires reading, but that goes beyond by focusing on the small (identifiable artifacts contained in books) and the big (corpora of books that can't be read by a single human). As an example from the book: Moretti analyzes a small subset of detective novels written in a single decade of the XIX century, "The total came to 108 (plus another fifty items or so [...]), and--it took time. But I have read them all". If you thought Moretti doesn't read books... Finally, one virtue Franco Moretti has and is largely exposed in this book, is his ability to make good questions. As he says "the trouble is, we literary scholars are not good at that: we are trained to listen, not to ask questions". An example of one he poses, that might seem strange at first, but that lead to interesting paths of inquiry: why novels are written in prose?. Is already a cliché that a data scientist main skill is to identify (to craft) good questions, that this ability is more important even than the capacity to provide the best answers to already existent problems. In that sense, Moretti is an excellent data scientist. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Generally fine, revisionist reading *by H***N on September 21, 2014* Generally fine, revisionist reading. Too bad Moretti knows hardly anything about present Latin American narrative, a discussion of which would have gone a long way toward making his arguments more solid and convincing. Having read one canonical novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude does not allow him to pontificate about a whole region. In that regard he is no better than Jameson. Yet, Moretti is not as turgid, and can even throw in a joke. ### ⭐⭐ Your money is better spent elsewhere unless this is a text book or ... *by C***Y on June 24, 2015* The title is capitalizing on the fashion of "distant reading" by collecting a number of essays by Moretti. Your money is better spent elsewhere unless this is a text book or something. --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.es/products/9234482-distant-reading](https://www.desertcart.es/products/9234482-distant-reading) --- *Product available on Desertcart Spain* *Store origin: ES* *Last updated: 2026-05-26*