The United States is the country of close reading, so I don’t expect this idea to be particularly popular. But the trouble with close reading [...] is that it necessarily depends on an extremely small canon. This may have become an unconscious and invisible premiss by now, but it is an iron one nonetheless: you invest so much in individual texts only if you think that very few of them really matter. Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense. And if you want to look beyond the canon (and of course, world literature will do so: it would be absurd if it didn’t!) close reading will not do it. It’s not designed to do it, it’s designed to do the opposite. At bottom, it’s a theological exercise—very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously—whereas what we really need is a little pact with the devil: we know how to read texts, now let’s learn how not to read them. Distant reading: where distance, let me repeat it, is a condition of knowl- edge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems. (p.57)

Question: Based on the above excerpt from ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, do you find Moretti’s innovative ‘distant reading’ approach to world literature a justifiable and promising endeavor, compared with the traditional ‘close reading’? 

             The macroscopic quantitative methodology (known as distant reading) by which Moretti re-examines the mapping and history of world literature could expose the myopic vision of the conventional western scholars and readers, who emphasize too heavily on 'close reading' a handful of academically recognized texts within the controversial Eurocentric canon while neglecting the enormous body of the unread. Moretti argues that unlike distant readers, who could glean crucial literary trends and patterns from the big data of numerous texts, close readers are perpetuating the ignorant notion that 'very few of them[literary texts] really matter' by 'invest[ing] so much in individual texts’ - in other words, the arbitrary hierarchy of 'high' and 'low' within literature. The moral and democractic impulses behind his inventive way of reading, I think, are quite valid. The selection bias of the orthodox close readers would hinder them from acknowledging the existence and impact of the unnoticed literature and discovering a more comprehensive picture of global literary systems and genres. For instance, in staunchly embracing the closed, narrow Western Canon and deifying the Bard, Harold Bloom appears to overstate the universal influence of the western writers he adores and insidiously mold the literary opinion of his audience in his own image. In Shakespeare: the invention of the human, Bloom closely analyses Shakespeare's plays, contending that the playwright 'invented the human as we continue to know it' and 'has become the first universal author, replacing the Bible in the secularized consciousness' (10). By placing Shakespeare on the universal pedestal, the critic fallaciously reduces the development of world literature to a singular movement in the West and embodies the danger of close reading that Moretti stresses. Similarly, lacking a massive or convincing amount of statistics to bolster his thesis in The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt risks synthesizing merely the texts he is familiar with and simplifying the emergence of the British novel as a linear single rise sparked off by the 1719 publication of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (92). His perspective is also limited to the western canon, while overlooking the rise of novels in China and other countries in the East. What Moretti's computational approach reveals to the close readers is the unseen value of the unread and untranslated as well as well as their previous error in promoting unsubstantiated grandiose literary claims. He would probably divert us from overly concentrating on the widely read Victorian novels, such as the works of the Brontes, Eliot and Dickens, and making sweeping generalizations about the totality of the 19th century British literature. Though his motivation behind distant reading is rather utopian (as it is virtually impossible to gather data from every existing literary text), he points out the necessity of transcending the existing canon to cultivate a more informed and critical reading mind.

              However, while Moretti's daring strategy of distant reading is well-intentioned and eye-opening, I do not agree with the way he dismisses close reading as a 'theological exercise' that signifies a bygone tradition. One should not downplay the irreplaceable importance of close reading because without scrutinizing the particular context of the researched texts, it is hard to decipher any meaning attached to the 'devices, themes, tropes' employed by the authors. For example, one could effortlessly determine how many times Eliot uses the imagery of 'web' by means of word mining. Yet the frequency of this signifier would convey nothing about the signified, until one incorporates close reading to investigate the reason behind the signifier's recurrence. Therefore Moretti's a-textual analysis should not be regarded as an independent interpretative tool itself, as it might only be effective in expanding our ontological knowledge about the elusive nature of world literature (eg. what is literature and how many literary texts are there). The advantages of distant reading are best manifest when we complement it with close reading instead of viewing it as a superior substitute. Using graphs and statistics, Moretti observes an intriguing fact that Horatio is the central figure who is connected to most characters in Hamlet: 'he[Horatio] inhabits a part of the network where clustering is so low...that, without him, it disintegrates' (227). Nevertheless, the finding is skin-deep because without the aid of close reading, he is unable of demonstrating and articulating the exact significance of this newfound fact. The data unfortunately become the ends in themselves, rather than the means with which he could explicate his deeper insights towards the work. Distant reading, in fact, is as vulnerable to misuse and abuse as close reading. People could use distant reading for the sake of using it, or end up leaping to reductive conclusions about certain literary phenomenon if their quantitative studies begin with erroneous algorithms and premise. An illuminating example would be Blatt’s Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve, which falsely asserts that ‘classic literature by men is about men by a quantifiable and overwhelming margin’ based on the unfounded assumption that books with the high usage of the gendered pronoun ‘he’ must be male-centric (44). Hence it is futile to discuss whether distant reading per se is essentially better than close reading; whether these approaches could increase our current understanding of literature depends on the users. Instead, more attention should be devoted to seeking reliable ways of analysing ‘the units ‘that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems’ so that the distant readers could establish a more accurate macro-perspective of literature without distorting the original texts. 

             Despite the imperfections of Moretti's distant reading, he nonetheless helps pave the way for the more instrumental researches by the digital humanities and shows us the tremendous potential of quantitative analysis in literary studies. In particular, the use of computational stylometry enables us to tackle the mystery of some famous works' authorship. In 1963, Mosteller and Wallace successfully attributed the authorship of the twelve of The Federalist papers to Madison instead of Hamilton (Blatt 4). During the 21st century, scholars also have been attempting to trace the sources and authorship of Shakespeare's plays through stylometric analysis. All these might not have happened without the advent of distant reading.

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