-
About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Last Kind Words, an anthology of poems after Geeshie Wiley’s song, edited by Peter Riley
2. ‘Ghost’ and eight more poems, by Veroniki Dalakoura, translated by John Taylor
3. The Metaphoric Graveyard, a short essay by Alan Wall
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause and Dreamt Affections| Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych
More below. Scroll down.
4. New to The Fortnightly Review? Our online series is more than ten years old! YOU MAY NEVER CATCH UP, BUT YOU CAN START HERE: Peter Riley: Poetry Notes: Winter reading |Alan Morrison: June Haunting | Kallic Distance, explained by Michial Farmer | Thesis: Stravinsky. Part four of Tronn Overend’s comments on Adorno and music | Two uncollected personal poems by Roy Fisher, with comments by Peter Robinson | Anthony Rudolf reviews The Hölderliniae by Nathaniel Tarn (with an excerpt) | The reascent of Spengler’s Decline by James Gallant | Three new poems by Simon Smith | Tom Lowenstein’s poem To the Muses | Michael Hampton reviews Turner’s Loom | Le meutre: the death of Camus, reviewed by Michelene Wandor | Peter Larkin: Extract from Trees the Seed |Anthony Howell on Julian Stannard’s Freeing Up | Wanton and two more poems, by Michael Egan | Alan Wall on Melancholy’s black sun | Paul Cohen parses Words and Lies | Bruce Kinzer on Leslie Stephen and the Metaphysicals | Richard Johnson: The Present Dystopian Paranoia | Nights In and two more new poems by Anthony Howell Dreamt Affections, a sequence by Peter Robinson | Freedom and justice at the Warburg by Peter McCarey | A Brexit Fudge by Alan Macfarlane | The poem’s not in the word by C. F. Keary | Peter Riley’s Poetry Notes: An Anthology for the Apocalypse | Diderot: The Curious Materialist, by Caroline Warman | Cambridge and two more poems by Ralph Hawkins | Gerard Manley Hopkins: No Worst There Is None, by Alan Wall | Hoyt Rogers: Seeing with Words: Yves Bonnefoy and the Seicento | Dragon Rock, and two more short fictions, by Umiyuri Katsuyama, translated by Toshiya Kamei | Adorno and the Philosophy of Modern Music: Part three of the essay by Tronn Overend | Michael Buckingham Gray: Back to the drawing board, an extremely short story | Customer. Relationship. Management. A downloadable polemic by Sascha Akhtar | Strictly Scrum: Michelene Wandor on the life and work of James Haskell, flanker | Michial Farmer On Elegance | Telling it for ourselves: Simon Collings on the latest cinema news from Africa | Stephen Wade on the Good Soldier and his creator: The Good Writer Hašek | Six prose poems by Scott Thurston | The Seicento and the Cult of Images by Yves Bonnefoy, and ‘Seeing with Words: Yves Bonnefoy and the Seicento,’ by Hoyt Rogers | Jonathan Gorvett, In Djibouti with The Angel of Hulme | An Aural Triptych by Daragh Breen | Immanuel Kant and the origin of the dialectic, the second part of Tronn Overend’s essay on Adorno and music | Three bilinguacultural poems by Changming Yuan | The Optician, short fiction by Cecilia Eudave | (a bean) — fiction by Marzia D’Amico | Stories from The Jazz Age by Aidan Semmens | ‘The London Cage’ and three more poems, by Judith Willson | Manifestos for a lost cause: A sequence of poems by Peter Robinson | Seven new poems by Barry Schwabsky | The poetry of social commitment: Poetry Notes by Peter Riley | The poet as essayist, by Alan Wall | On Gathering and Togethering in Medellin by Richard Berengarten | Two songs by Tristram Fane Saunders | What Heroism Feels Like: Fiction by Benjamin Wolfe | Two poems: ‘Inbound’ and one untitled about Ziggy by Nigel Wheale | Iconoclasm and portraiture in recent fiction by Paul Cohen | The Weimar Republic and critical theory: Adorno on modern music. First in a series by Tronn Overend | From the archive: Art, constantly aspiring: The School of Giorgione by Walter Pater | Seven very, very short fictions by Tom Jenks | The Seicento and the Cult of Images by Yves Bonnefoy | Three poems after reading Heine by Tom Lowenstein | Six new poems by Johanna Higgins | Macanese Concrete by Peter McCarey | ‘Leave-taking’, the end of a left-bank affair. By Ian Seed | Peter Riley probes Laura Riding’s many modes and offers his 2020 list of summer reviews |Bibliographic Archæology in Cairo by Raphael Rubinstein | Steve Xerri: Ezra Pound’s life in verse — with two more new poems, one featuring Keats | New Poems by Carrie Etter and Anna Forbes | ‘So, Dreams’ and three more poems, by Luke Emmett | Simon Collings wanders Buñuel’s labyrinth of artifice | Matt Hanson on the Romaniotes in America | For Once, a short fiction by Susana Martín Gijón | Four prose poems by Jane Monson | Jesse Glass and the poetry of ‘ouch’, explained: Pain… | Three poems, one very prose-like, by Claire Crowther | Two new poems by Sandra Kolankiewicz | Michelene Wandor reviews a metro-anthology from London’s twin cities | Simon Collings interviews Jeremy Noel-Tod, anthologist of prose poetry | Alan Wall: How we see now. A Note on Inscape, Descriptionism and Logical Form | Simon Perril: Poems from ‘the Slip’ | Michael Blackburn reviews Byatt’s Odd Angel | Christopher Landrum looks through Chris Arnade’s candid camera at America | Nigel Wheale reviews Ian Crockatt’s translations of the Skaldic verse of Orkney | Osip Mandelstam’s Tristia, in a new translation by Peter McCarey | Anna de Noailles: Thirteen poems in versions by Anthony Howell | Meandering through the Belle-Époque with Anthony Howell | Peter Riley‘s Poetry Notes for Summer 2020 | Three collections of prose poetry: 1.Nine haibun by Sheila E. Murphy | 2.Hurt Detail and two more prose poems by Lydia Unsworth | 3.Ten prose poems, five about men. By Mark Russell | The Latest Event in the History of the Novel by Paul Cohen | Life after life: Viduities, an essay by Alan Wall | As Grass Will Amend (Intend) Its Surfaces, by landscape poet Peter Larkin | More delicate, if minor, interconnections. Poetry by Tom Lowenstein | What Peter Knobler discovered out Walking While White in New York City | Alan Wall reviews Ian Sansom’s autopsy of Auden’s September 1, 1939 | A few very short fictions by Georgia Wetherall | A Play — for 26 Voices by Alice Notley | Four new poems from Credo, Stephen Wiest‘s new collection | Nigel Wheale on the significance and frailty of Raymond Crump | Ottomania! Matt Hanson reports on three new Turkish titles | Cinema: Simon Collings looks into Andrew Kötting’s Whalebone Box | Gowersby. A new puzzle-fiction by Shukburgh Ashby | The Jinn of Failaka: Reportage byMartin Rosenstock | Five Hung Particles by Iain Britton | Three poems from ‘Sovetica’ by Caroline Clark | It’s about time—Boustrophedon time: Anthony Howell is Against Pound | When words fail: Alan Wall diagnoses Shakespeare’s Dysnarrativia | Olive Custance, Lord Alfred Douglas’s much, much better half. By Ferdi McDermott | Three gardens and a dead man by Khaled Hakim | Poems from The Messenger House by Janet Sutherland | Two new poems by British-Canadian poet Pete Smith | Mob Think: Michael Blackburn reviews Kevin D. Williamson’s Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mobs | Natalia Ginzburg’s On Women. The first translation in English, by Nicoletta Asciuto | Alan Wall: Considering I, alone, An interrogation of the isolated first person | Anthony Howell reviews Christopher Reid’s ‘Love, Loss and Chianti’ | Jeremy Hilton: An excerpt from Fulmar’s Wing | Peter Riley: Hakim and Byrne and a spring storm of ‘Poetry Notes’ | Simon Collings with news of African films, including a review of Mati Diop’s Atlantics |Alan Price reviews Anthony Howell’s mind-body reflections | Franca Mancinelli: Pages from the Croatian Notebook, in a translation by John Taylor |Anne Stevenson: A tribute to Eugene Dubnov | David Hay: Two poems, one in prose | Four poems from ‘Lectio Volant’ by Steve Ely | Seven very short stories by Ian Seed | Advice from all over: Peter Riley on How to Write Poetry | Geoffrey Hill and the Perturbation of Baruch by Anthony O’Hear | Bird of four tongues by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee | Deirdre Mikolajcik: Abstract Wealth and Community in The Way We Live Now (Trollope Prize) | Nyssa Ruth Fahy on A Less-Beaten Path: Trollope’s West Indian fiction (Trollope Prize) | Blame it on the rain: flash fiction on two wheels, by Michael Buckingham Gray | True love—at 103: Breakfast with Mrs Greystone by S.D. Brown | The last Mantegna: fiction by Michelene Wandor | My first thirty years: A serial by Alan Macfarlane | Quotidian verse: She went to the hospital for an infection. By T. Smith-Daly | Tradition, by Enzo Kohara Franca. ‘My mother’s parents didn’t make it easy for her. In 1938 they immigrated from Sendai, where all men are Japanese, to São Paulo, where all men are Brazilian.’ | Peter Riley: Autumn reviews of new poetry | George Maciunas and Fluxus, reviewed by Simon Collings | The Political Agent in Kuwait, by Piers Michael Smith | Mother child: fiction by Conor Robin Madigan | The marital subtext of The State of the Union, reviewed by Michelene Wandor | Swincum-le-Beau, a puzzle-fiction in the spirit of Pevsner. By Shukburgh Ashby | Gibraltar Point and three more poems by Iain Twiddy | Six quite brief fictions by Simon Collings | James Gallant: Puttering with E.M. Cioran | Blind man’s fog and other poems by Patrick Williamson | None of us: a poem by Luke Emmett | Rankine’s uncomfortable citizenship by Michelene Wandor | Languages: A Ghazal by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee | Seven more poems by Tom Lowenstein | Five poems from ‘Mattered by Tangents’ by Tim Allen | Anthony Howell: Freewheeling through some post-summer reading | ‘Noise’ and three more new poems by Maria de Araújo | A shelf of new poetry books for summer reviewed by Peter Riley in ‘Poetry Notes’ | Film: Simon Collings on Peter Strickland’s In Fabric | Michelene Wandor reviews Helen Dunmore’s Counting Backwards | Mauritius in three voices, by Emma Park | The hidden virtues of T-units and n-grams, by Davina Allison | Peter McCarey reviews W.D. Jackson’s latest Opus | Seven new poems by poet-ethnographer Tom Lowenstein | Anthony Howell: Empyrean Suite, an afterlife collaboration with Fawzi Karim | Christine Gallant reviews Herb Childress’s book on the life of the Adjunct Prof | The talk of The Dolphin, King’s Cross, as reported by Michael Mahony | Franca Mancinelli: Eight poems from Mala Kruna, in translations by John Taylor | A short question: Who will read short stories? David McVey answers | Eavesdropping on Olmecs: New poems by Jesse Glass | Two new poems by Laura Potts | Simon Collings on existence and its discontents in Capernaum | Peter Riley: Reviews yet more new prose-poetry | Anthony Rudolf remembers Turkish poet, novelist and essayist Moris Farhi | James Gallant sheds new light on the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels | Theatre: Third Person Theatre Co., and ‘The Noises’ reviewed by Anthony Howell | A fourth gulp of prose poems from ‘The Dice Cup’ by Max Jacob in a new translation by Ian Seed | Lots more short fiction: A new item by Michael Buckingham Gray and a full half-dozen by Simon Collings | Apollo 17 and the Cartoon Moon: Lunar poetry by James Bullion | Juvenal may be missing his moment: Satire for the millennium by Anthony Howell | Pickle-fingered truffle-snouter: fiction by Robert Fern | April Is the Cruellest Month: London fiction by Georgie Carroll | The Beginning and the End of Art…in Tasmania. By Tronn Overend | Kathy Stevens’s plate of fresh fiction: Everything in This Room is Edible | Boy, a new poem tall and lean by Tim Dooley | Beckett, Joyce, words, pictures — all reviewed by Peter O’Brien | Even more new translations by Ian Seed from Max Jacob’s Dice Cup | Poetry written in Britain’s ‘long moment’: A dialogue and portfolio of work by Peter Robinson and Tim Dooley | ‘Remembering Ovid’, a new poem by Alan Wall | Four new poems by Luke Emmett | Hugo Gibson on Discount entrepreneurship and the start-up accelerator | ‘Half a Black Moon’ and three more new poems by Seth Canner | Martin Stannard’s life-lessons: What I did and how I did it | Anthony Howell on three indelible images left after a season of exhibitions | You good? Anthony O’Hear reviews Christian Miller’s The Character Gap. | Peter Riley on Olson, Prynne, Paterson and ‘extremist’ poetry of the last century. | Three prose poems by Linda Black,with a concluding note on the form | Simon Collings watches Shoplifters, critically | Tim McGrath: In Keen and Quivering Ratio — Isaac Newton and Emily Dickinson together at last | Daragh Breen: A Boat-Shape of Birds: A sequence of poems | Peter Riley reviews First-Person ‘Identity’ Poems: New collections by Zaffar Kunial and Ishion Hutchinson | Marko Jobst’s A Ficto-Historical Theory of the London Underground reviewed by Michael Hampton | José-Flores Tappy: A Poetic Sequence from ‘Trás-os-Montes’ | Nick O’Hear: Brexit and the backstop and The tragedy of Brexit | Ian Seed: back in the building with Elvis | Nigel Wheale’s remembrance of ‘11.11.11.18’| Franca Mancinelli: Maria, towards Cartoceto, a memoir | Tamler Sommers’s Gospel of Honour, a review by Christopher Landrum | Typesetters delight: Simon Collings reviews Jane Monson’s British Prose Poetry | In Memoriam: Nigel Foxell by Anthony Rudolf | David Hackbridge Johnson rambles through Tooting | Auld acquaintances: Peter Riley on Barry MacSweeney and John James | ‘Listening to Country Music’ and more new poems by Kelvin Corcoran | Latest translations by Ian Seed from Max Jacob’s The Dice Cup | Claire Crowther: four poems from her forthcoming ‘Solar Cruise’| Anthony Howell on the lofty guardians of the new palace | War and the memory of war, a reflection by Jerry Palmer | The ‘true surrealist attentiveness’ of Ian Seed’s prose poems, reviewed by Jeremy Over | Antony Rowland: Three place-poems, a response to Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Brontë | New fiction by Gabi Reigh | Simon Collings reviews ‘Faces Places’ by Agnès Varda and JR | Ian Seed’s life-long love of short prose-poems | Michael Buckingham Gray’s extremely short story: ‘A woman’s best friend.’ | Simon Collings’s new fiction: Four short prose pieces | Anthony Costello: ‘Coleridge’s Eyes’ were his shaping spirits | Anthony Rudolf remembers poet and broadcaster Keith Bosley | Michael Hampton on Jeremy David Stock’s ‘Posthuman and categorically nebulous art writing’ | Peter O’Brien meets Paulette, Martin Sorrell’s ‘extravagent mystery’ of a mother | Anthony Howell reviews Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory | :: For much more, please consult our partial archive, below on this page.
Contact The Fortnightly.
Books received: Updated list.
-
LONDON
Readings in The Room: 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS – £5 entry plus donation for refreshments. All enquiries: 0208 801 8577
Poetry London: Current listings here.
Shearsman readings: 7:30pm at Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1. Further details here.NEW YORK
Time Out’s New York listings here.
2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein. Now running.
In the New Series
- The Current Principal Articles.
- A note on the Fortnightly’s ‘periodicity’.
- Cookie Policy
- Copyright, print archive & contact information.
- Editorial statement and submission guidelines.
- For subscribers: Odd Volumes from The Fortnightly Review.
- Mrs Courtney’s history of The Fortnightly Review.
- Newsletter
- Submission guidelines.
- Support for the World Oral Literature Project.
- The Fortnightly Review’s email list.
- The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.
- The Initial Prospectus of The Fortnightly Review.
- The Trollope Prize.
- The Editors and Contributors.
- An Explanation of the New Series.
- Subscriptions & Commerce.
-
By Roger Berkowitz, Juliet du Boulay, Denis Boyles, Stan Carey, H.R. Haxton, Allen M. Hornblum, Alan Macfarlane, Anthony O’Hear, Andrew Sinclair, Harry Stein, Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, and many others. Free access.
· James Thomson [B.V.]
Occ. Notes…
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
.
Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
.Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
-
Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
.
Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
.
Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
.
The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
.
Prohibition’s ‘original Progressives’.
.
European populism? Departments
Subscribe
0 Comments
Literature, operationalized.
A Fortnightly Review of
Canon/Archive: Studies in Quantitative Formalism from the Stanford Literary Lab
Franco Moretti, editor
n+1 Foundation 2017 | 336pp | $18.56 £16.07
By CHLOË HAWKEY.
The work focuses on nineteenth-century literature—with brief forays into the eighteenth century—but not just on the relatively narrow canon that we all know so well: Austen, Bronte, Dickens, Shelley, Hardy. Instead, Moretti and his fellow researchers turn to the broadest archive available to them, striving to have their work represent, whenever possible, the same range of writers and books to which their contemporary readers would have had access. Though, to some extent, this is simply part of an effort to be as “scientific” as possible, it also represents an admirable democratic impulse, one which deserves some acknowledgment. (Interestingly, the collection includes a chapter on the question of the canon versus the archive, in which the researchers discover, through tracking the type of language used in canonical versus non-canonical texts, that what held back the long-term popularity of the latter was their indulgence in “heteroglossia,” essentially other languages—the news, politics, aesthetics of the day. In other words, we love Austen today because she doesn’t require us to be versed in the political life of small-town, nineteenth-century England; we can still relate to her. So there is reason why we read the books we do today—but we needed Moretti et al. to work with that larger archive on our behalf in order to explain that reason to us.)
The Stanford Literary Lab is a phenomenon that is much more difficult to imagine existing at any university other than that incubator of Silicon Valley-style ‘innovation.’
As a child of the Bay Area, I’ve grown up with Silicon Valley looming large in my imagination—and not always in a good way—so the idea that this collection might demonstrate an ability to put the number-crunching, data-driven, housing-market-destroying forces of Silicon Valley to good work in revitalizing literary criticism was one that I coveted. And indeed, Canon/Archive does demonstrate the flexibility of this seemingly traditional field, does demonstrate that literary criticism is not a fossil so much as another evolving creature, capable of moving and changing with the rest of the world. This is, in itself, a worthy contribution to the field, and not one to be taken lightly.
The methods they use as they apply their algorithms to literature are innovative indeed. In order to study subjects like the style of sentences, the thematic value of paragraphs, and the geographical locations of emotions in London, the researchers used computer programs—perhaps most often, programs that determined the frequency of certain words within texts over time. Thus, having programmed the computer to identify a certain word or a certain type of word, they feed massive amounts of text from digital archives into it and receive, in return, massive amounts of data about the recurrence of certain words or syntactical features or their trends over time. This data they then proceed to plot on graphs and charts, which, Moretti assures us in the introduction, are methods of displaying “the specific object of study of computational criticism…our ‘text’; the counterpart to what a well-defined excerpt is to close reading.” Unfortunately, what the Literary Lab researchers fail to take into account is that most of the readers of their book are hardly specialists in understanding such graphs of “big data.” For this reader, at least, the most they could offer were those visual representations of the same trends over time that were already described in the text. Alas.
Nevertheless, the researchers’ general strategy succeeds: they gather the data, identify the patterns in it, and then use their background in literary theory to analyze those patterns along conceptual lines. They seem quite proud of the way in which they weave their results and conceptual analysis together, the way they ground their theories in data and elucidate their data with theories: “Only from their encounter,” they assure us, “did critical knowledge arise.”
We are left with what is, in all fairness, a quite convincing movement from huge quantities of data, through patterns, to new forms of conceptual awareness.
We are left with what is, in all fairness, a quite convincing movement from huge quantities of data, through patterns, to new forms of conceptual awareness. I will readily admit that I am much less skeptical now than I was 308 pages ago about the possibility of “operationalizing”—essentially measuring—literature, about our ability to pin down “solid facts” about fiction, and about the use of “corroborating” existing literary theories.
Take, for example, the chapter titled “From Keywords to Cohorts,” a study of “novelistic language” conducted by Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac. In it, they describe their development of Correlator, a computer program that allowed them to track the “decade-level frequencies of words.” By recording how often particular words were used within a given decade and then by matching those words with other words that were used equally often (or rarely) over time, Correlator showed which words were used together and when. This program returned the remarkable discovery that correspondence in meaning could appear out of this strictly historical-frequency data. In other words, when the researchers entered the word “integrity” into Correlator to find what words in the corpus had the most similar historical behavior, the words returned included “modesty,” “sensibility,” and “reason.” Seeking only similarity in historical use, they discovered similarity in meaning.
Ultimately, Heuser and Le-Khac put Correlator to use identifying and making sense of one key trend: over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this set of words, which they call “abstract value” words, declined as the use of concrete, descriptive words increased. They were then able to use this discovery to explain a social shift over this same period, in which an increasingly urban population rendered small-town morality irrelevant; in a world of strangers (such as nineteenth-century London), everything and everyone was unfamiliar, and intimate moral valuation became impossible.
Heuser and Le-Khac write of Correlator’s role in this process, “It took a computational method of finding language trends to discover this other group of words that, while not semantically related to the abstract value words, are historically related.” In other words, this computer program, with its ability to create and analyze huge amounts of data, enabled them to write intellectual history, to track the way people were thinking over time.
Even for something of a literary-critical traditionalist like myself, it didn’t take much convincing for me to find both the value and the excitement in Heuser and Le-Khac’s research. I was more skeptical when it came to aspects of literature more artistic, if you will, than word usage over time. Scribbled in the margins of Moretti’s introduction, next to a sentence that began “Katsma found a way of operationalizing his intuition,” I left a note that says, “Should intuition be operationalized?”—which, I confess, filled me with self-righteousness as I wrote it. But upon returning to it several days later, having read Harvard grad student Holst Katsma’s chapter on loudness in the novel, I found that I could answer in the affirmative fairly easily. Yes—one can (though perhaps “should” remains a bit strong) take a vague feeling for how a piece of literature works and find a way to measure it, or at least Katsma can.
Katsma then goes on to plot the loudness of two novels, Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, on a chapter-by-chapter basis. He finds, and his graphs convincingly display, that loudness within an individual work of literature builds in a series of crescendos—louder, louder, louder, and then quieter for a while, quieter still, until it begins to grow again. Assuming, perhaps rather boldly, that these two books are representative of the archive at large, loudness thus provides, as he points out, “a means for thinking about novelistic order while maintaining an interesting distance from the plot.”
Indeed, it does. I confess that I found this chapter fascinating: I knew exactly what he meant when he first mentioned “loudness,” but I couldn’t imagine a way to measure it (or, as I now know to write, to operationalize it). And so, to watch as he found a way to do that and then as he entered so much text into a computer and made sense of such a veritable mountain of data—it was amazing. And as a result of the process, I do have some new sense of the way that dialogue functions in a novel, a sense that will perhaps even change how I read in some modest way.
And yet. It is impossible not to wonder, as my frequent and increasingly urgent scribblings in the margins of the book ask, to what end? What do these literary concepts, so scientifically proven, so articulately expressed do—for me, for you, for Katsma?
KATSMA SEEMS MORE aware than most of the critics in this collection that the reader actually exists, so he is less hesitant to address the way that literature affects readers. But even he fails to press ahead, fails to suggest the way that the emotional impact of a novel can move a reader—to kindness, to self-awareness, to understanding, to action.
It’s a frustrating shortcoming and ultimately the one that most stands in the way of my enthusiasm for this collection. We’re busy. If we weren’t busy before January 20, 2017, we’re certainly busy now. If a book is going to ask for our time, attention, and energy, it needs to assure us of its importance—and this book, important though it has the potential to be, utterly refuses to do that.
In his conclusion, Moretti writes, “Algorithms have changed what we study, and how we study it. Think of reading. For centuries, reading has been indispensable to the understanding of literature. In front of Figure 10.1, it is nothing. Nothing. Just to be clear, it’s not that we should stop reading books. Reading is one of life’s great pleasures.”
Despite Moretti’s claim, ‘reading is not merely “indispensable to the understanding of literature.”’
I might begin by pointing out that reading is not merely “indispensable to the understanding of literature.” Tape is indispensable to the wrapping of presents. Knives are indispensable to the cutting of holiday pies. Reading is the whole means by which literature exists in our world; reading is the only way we can come to know literature intimately, emotionally.
As such reading is not some frivolous amusement, not merely a “pleasure.” Anyone who picks up a book like Canon/Archive is someone who has been terrified by a work of literature, and I don’t mean by some gruesome zombie scene, but by the sheer power of the words. Those of us who seek out literary criticism are those who have finished books too overwhelming to describe, who have been moved to tears and odd swells of emotion, who have the tendency to grope through our bookshelves and favorite libraries and bookstores on bad days—and we come knocking on the doors of critics because we hope that they might have the words that we don’t have to describe the awe, or anger, or frustration we feel in the presence of those books.
We do not come for algorithms or for patterns, or even for the assurance that this newly discovered trend grew out of a historical development. We come for something at once bigger and deeper and more elusive. Lionel Trilling, that great mid-century literary critic and proponent of morality (in more of a left-liberal sense than a Christian-right sense), wrote, “The novelist goes where the law cannot go; he tells the truth where the formulations of even the subtlest ethical theorist cannot…he gives us the models or the examples by which, half-unconsciously, we make our own moral selves.” This is what we seek in reading fiction, and by extension, what we hope our best critics will elucidate for us. I wish Moretti and associates had succeeded in this—god only knows, our moral selves could use all the help they can get these days.
♦
“Enchanting…” Don replies, dripping sarcasm. “What?”
Most of the time that I was reading this book, I felt like Don: Enchanting—what? This is all well and good. It’s remarkable what computers can do and equally what these students of literature can do with these computers, large digital archives, and a long list of algorithms. And some of their findings are truly very interesting: it is possible to measure loudness in a novel and to plot the change in loudness in novels over time! You can keep track of the way that abstract value words gave way to concrete descriptive words over the nineteenth century!
But always, after I smiled and granted that I was enchanted, I was left with the what? What does this mean to my life or to Franco Moretti’s? This deepens my understanding, in a very technical sense, of the text, but does it enrich the experience I have reading in it? And does it enrich the life I lead once I’ve capped my pen and returned the book to the shelf?
Of course, as fans of Singing in the Rain know, the joke may be on me: ultimately, Cosmo’s lip-synching plan saves the musical and the love story both. It turns out to be far more than a cute trick—it opens to a Hollywood community set in its ways a whole new way of moving forward. I leave that possibility open.
But, if I may: computational criticism is going to need a considerable dose of the compelling and the urgent if it hopes to achieve a level of Gene-Kelly-tap-dancing revelation.
♦
Associate editor Chloë Hawkey studied American History and Latin at Columbia University. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area and works as a whitewater river guide on the Rogue river in the summer months. She is the Fortnightly‘s ‘American Note’ columnist; an archive of her Notes is here.
Related
Publication: Saturday, 7 April 2018, at 15:29.
Options: Archive for Chloe Hawkey. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.