Franco Moretti (born 1950 in Sondrio) is an Italian literary scholar, trained as a Marxist critic,

whose work focuses on the history of the novel as a "planetary form". He is currently a senior
advisor at EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland. He was
Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature in the
Department of English (and, by courtesy, of German Studies) at Stanford University in California,
where he also founded the Center for the Study of the Novel and the Literary Lab. Moretti has
written several books, including Signs Taken for Wonders (1983), The Way of the World (1987),
Modern Epic (1995), Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (1998), Graphs, Maps, Trees:
Abstract Models for a Literary History (2005), Distant Reading (2013), and The Bourgeois (2013).
His recent work is notable for importing, not without controversy, quantitative methods from the
social sciences into domains that have traditionally belonged to the humanities. To date, his books
have been translated into fifteen languages.

Biography

Moretti earned his doctorate in modern literature from the La Sapienza University of Rome in 1972,
graduating summa cum laude. He was professor of comparative literature at Columbia University
before being appointed to the Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professorship at Stanford University.
There, he founded the Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel. He has given the Carpenter
Lectures at the University of Chicago, the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton, and the
Beckman Lectures at the University of California-Berkeley. In 2006, he was named to the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also has been a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He
is a frequent contributor to the New Left Review and a member of Retort, a Bay Area-based group of
radical intellectuals. He is also a scientific adviser to the French Ministry of Research. Moretti
retired from Stanford in 2016 and now lives in Switzerland. Besides being Emeritus Professor at
Stanford, Moretti is currently a Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, and teaches
Digital Humanities at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
He is the brother of Italian filmmaker and Palme d'Or-winner Nanni Moretti. He played roles in
three films directed by his brother: The Defeat (La sconfitta, 1973, short), Pâté de bourgeois (1973,
short), and I Am Self Sufficient (Io sono un autarchico, 1976).

Work

Moretti has made several significant contributions to literary history and theory. While the majority
of literary critics of the 1990s–2000s were concerned with (relatively subjective) interpretations of
literature, Moretti offered a variety of materialistic, empirical approaches to literature and other arts.
His major contributions were in the domains of literary geography (which is now largely associated
with Moretti's name) and digital humanities; he also contributed to combining literary studies with
the world-systems analysis and Darwinian theory of evolution. Moretti has coined several concepts
that are now widely used in the humanities, the main of which is distant reading. Distant reading is
opposed to close reading: a traditional approach in literary studies when a critic closely examines a
separate text, tracing all the possible intertextual connections, author's intentions, etc. Distant
reading has the opposite goal: the scholar should "step back" from an individual text to see a larger
picture: the whole field of literary production, a genre system, etc. Moretti and his followers take
the longue durée view of literature – looking at the temporal trends in dozens or even hundreds of
years of literary history.

The History of Bourgeois Culture

Moretti's scientific work has largely focused on European bourgeois culture, beginning with The
Way of the World. The Bildungsroman in European Culture (1987, second enlarged ed. 2000) The
book examines the great tradition of the novel of youth – Wilhelm Meister, Pride and Prejudice,
The Red and the Black, Eugene Onegin, Lost Illusions, Great Expectations, Sentimental Education,
Middlemarch ... – considered as the “symbolic form” that allowed nineteenth-century culture to
make sense of the political revolutions and economic transformations of western modernity.
Modern Epic. The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez (1996), broadened the analysis in
space and time, examining texts that transcend national cultures in trying to represent the planetary
system of capitalism: Faust, Moby-Dick, Wagner's Ring, Ulysses, The Waste Land, and the great
narratives of Latin-American magic realism. More recently, The Bourgeois. Between History and
Literature (2013) has completed this trilogy of bourgeois existence by tracing its historical
keywords (“useful”, “comfort”, “efficiency”, “seriousness”, “roba”...), and following the
metamorphoses of “prose” from Defoe to Ibsen and Max Weber.

Literary Geography

Moretti has offered a new – cartographic – perspective on literature in his Atlas of the European
Novel. On the one hand, he demonstrated geographic patterns that can be traced within literature:
the geography of Jane Austen's characters, places of origin of villains in British literature, the
locations of Balzac's novels, etc. On the other hand, Moretti suggested studying the geography of
literary economics: how and why translations of novels spread across Europe, how book selection
in small town libraries differ from book selection in the libraries in large cities, etc.

Digital Humanities

Together with Matthew Jockers, Moretti has founded Stanford Literary Lab in 2010. Already in his
Atlas, Moretti approached literature with quantitative methods. The Literary Lab continued this
direction of work, but this time – quantifying literature via the tools of digital text analysis. Those
methods include counting word frequencies, topic modeling, building character networks, etc. The
results of Lab's work were published as Pamphlets of the Literary Lab (the history of how Lab
arrived at this unusual publication format is described by Moretti in Pamphlet 12). Stanford Literary
Lab became one of the pioneering groups pursuing computational criticism, and a visible actor in
the new field of digital humanities. Equally novel was the concept of the humanities "lab", as it is
mostly associated with hard sciences.

World-Systems Analysis

In many of his works, Moretti relies on one strand of historical macrosociology – world-systems
analysis – and its main theorist, Immanuel Wallerstein. World-systems analysis divides all countries
into three groups: core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral. Core countries dominate the world by
having a monopoly over some kind of products, which they export to the peripheral and semi-
peripheral countries. Over time, the latter countries learn how to produce the much needed products
themselves, but core countries usually acquire monopolies over other important products, and so the
structure of the world-system remains relatively stable. Moretti suggested that the same principle
may work in the domain of arts. Certain countries have monopoly over producing film or literary
forms, while other countries import those forms. According to Moretti, in the 19th century England
and France constituted the core of the literary world-system, exporting novels worldwide; today,
Hollywood, which exports movies has a similar role.
Literary Evolution

Applying Darwinian theory to literature is an idea that dates back to the late 19th century (initial
attempts were made by Ferdinand Brunetière and Alexander Veselovsky). Literary Darwinism
becomes an influential movement in 20th century literary criticism. Joseph Carroll, Denis Dutton,
Jonathan Gottschall, Brian Boyd, Ellen Spolsky, Nancy Easterlin, among others, contributed to the
evolutionary literary studies. In their wake, Moretti used the techniques of "distant reading":
statistics and computation to study literary evolution. The interest in Darwin's theory in the
humanities coincided with the emergence in the 1990s and 2000s of the new research domain called
cultural evolution.

Sexual assault allegations

In November 2017, Moretti was accused of sexual assault, in a Facebook post, by a woman with
whom he had had a relationship 32 years earlier. He denied the accusation, stating the relationship
had been consensual. No formal proceeding was ever opened against him. A Stanford spokesperson
declared that the university was "determining 'whether there are any actions for Stanford to take'”,
and no action was taken. In 2017, two new allegations of Moretti sexually harassing graduate
students have surfaced: one from Jane Penner, a former doctoral student in English who attended a
summer seminar at Dartmouth when she said she had to set a dog loose to get Moretti to stop
propositioning her and leave her house late at night, and another incident described by multiple
sources who said Moretti lost a job opportunity at Johns Hopkins after a graduate student reported
that he touched her inappropriately.

Publications

Books

• Interpretazioni di Eliot. Roma: Savelli. 1975.

• Letteratura e ideologie negli anni trenta inglesi. Bari: Adriatica. 1976.
• Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms. Translated by Susan
Fischer; David Forgacs; David Miller. London: NLB: Verso Editions. 1983.
ISBN 978-0860910640.
• Il romanzo di formazione. [Milano]: Garzanti. 1986.
• Segni e stili del moderno. Torino: Einaudi. 1987. ISBN 978-8806593988.
• The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso. 1987.
ISBN 978-0860911593.
• Opere mondo: saggio sulla forma epica dal Faust a Cent'anni di solitudin. Torino: Einaudi.
1994. ISBN 978-8806135454.
• The Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez. London, New York:
Verso. 1996. ISBN 978-1859849347.
• Atlante del romanzo europeo, 1800-1900. Torino: G. Einaudi. 1997. ISBN 978-8806141325.
• Atlas of the European novel, 1800-1900. London, New York: Verso. 1998.
ISBN 978-1859848838.
• Il romanzo. Torino: G. Einaudi. 2003. ISBN 978-8806152901.
• Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London, New York: Verso.
2005. ISBN 978-1844670260.
• The Novel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 2006. ISBN 978-0691049472.
 • Lee, Richard E.; Moretti, Franco (2011). Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the
World. Duke University Press Books. ISBN 9780822348481.
• Distant Reading. London: Verso. 2013. ISBN 9781781680841.
• The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Verso. 2013.
ISBN 9781781680858.
• Far Country: Scenes from American Culture. New York City, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
ISBN 9780374272708.

Selected Journal Articles

• Flores D'Arcais, Paolo; Moretti, Franco (March 1, 1976). "Paradoxes of the Italian Political
Crisis". New Left Review. 0 (96): 35.
• "Paradoxes of the Italian Political Crisis". Genre. 15: 7. Spring 1982.
• "The Dialectic of Fear". New Left Review. 0 (126): 67. November 1982.
• "The Comfort of Civilization". Representations (12): 115–139. October 1985.
• "The Moment of Truth". New Left Review. 0 (159): 39. September 1986.
• "The Spell of Indecision". New Left Review. 0 (164): 27. July 1987.
• "Words Words Words: A Reply to Tony Pinkney". New Left Review. 0 (167page=127).
January 1988.
• "Modern European Literature: A Geographical Sketch". New Left Review. 0 (206): 86. July
1994.
• "Narrative Markets, ca. 1850". Review (Fernand Braudel Center). 20 (2): 151–174. April
1997.
• "Structure, Change, and Survival: A Response to Winthrop-Young". Diacritics. 29 (2): 41–
42. 1999.
• "The Slaughterhouse of Literature". Modern Language Quarterly. 61 (1): 207–228. 2000.
• "Conjectures on World Literature". New Left Review. 0 (1): 54. January 2000.
• "'New York Times' Obituaries". New Left Review. 0 (2): 104. March 2000.
• "MoMA 2000—The Capitulation". New Left Review. 0 (4): 98. July 2000.
• "Markets of the Mind". New Left Review. 0 (5): 111. September 2000.
• "Planet Hollywood". New Left Review. 0 (9): 90. May 2001.
• "More Conjectures". New Left Review. 0 (20): 73. March 2003.
• "Graphs, Maps, Trees" (PDF). New Left Review. 0 (24): 67. November 2003.
• "Graphs, Maps, Trees—2". New Left Review. 0 (26): 79–103. March 2004.
• "Graphs, Maps, Trees—3". New Left Review. 0 (28): 43–63. July 2004.
• "World-Systems Analysis, Evolutionary Theory, 'Weltliteratur'". Review (Fernand Braudel
Center). 28 (3): 217–228. January 2005.
• "The end of the beginning: A reply to Christopher Prendergast (Graphs, Maps, Trees:
Abstract Models for a Literary History)". New Left Review (41): 71. September 2006.
• "Cartes". Romantisme (4): 11. 2007.
• "The novel: History and Theory". New Left Review (52): 111–124. July 2008.
• "Style, Inc. Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles (British Novels, 1740–1850)". Critical
Inquiry. 36 (1pages=134–158). 2009.
• "Critical ResponseII. Relatively Blunt". Critical Inquiry. 36 (1): 172–174. 2009.
• "The Grey Area: Ibsen and the Spirit of Capitalism". New Left Review (61): 117–131.
January 2010.
• "History of the Novel, Theory of the Novel". Novel. 43 (1): 1–10. Spring 2010.
 • Moretti, Franco (March 2011). "Network Theory, Plot Analysis". New Left Review. II (68):
80–102.
• "Introduction to 'Learning to Read Data'". Victorian Studies. 54 (1): 6, 186. Autumn 2011.
• Moretti, Franco (May 2013). "Fog". New Left Review. II (81): 59–92.
• "Sobre l'evolució literària". L'Espill (43): 150–167. 2013.
• Moretti, Franco; Sanders, Valerie; Shook, Karen (June 27, 2013). "Middle-Class Value
Judgement". The Times Higher Education Supplement (2107): 46.
• Moretti, Franco (November 2013). "'Operationalizing' or, the Function of Measurement in
Literary Theory". New Left Review. II (84): 103–119.
• Moretti, Franco (2015). "Lukac's Theory of the Novel". New Left Review. II (91): 39–44.
• Moretti, Franco; Pestre, Dominique (2015). "Bankspeak: The Language of World Bank
Reports". New Left Review. II (92): 75–99.

Awards and honors

• 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award (Criticism), winner for Distant Reading[31][32][33]
• 2015 He is elected a permanent fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study