If you are having trouble with the NLR website, please provide details here, and we will try to improve the site accordingly.
Articles by Franco Moretti
-
Network Theory, Plot Analysis
in NLR 68, March-April 2011, pp. 80-102
Subjects: Literature
What can quantitative methods tell us about literary plots? Franco Moretti maps character networks from Shakespeare, Dickens and Cao Xueqin to shed light on questions of sovereignty, legitimacy and the reciprocity of social relations.
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish -
The Grey Area
in NLR 61, January-February 2010, pp. 117-131
Subjects: Literature
Flexible morality and capitalist imperatives of the bourgeois fin-de-siècle, as captured in the obscure misdeeds of Ibsen’s protagonists.
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish and Polish -
The Novel: History and Theory
in NLR 52, July-August 2008, pp. 111-124
Subjects: History and Historiography , Literature
Moretti’s 5-volume Il romanzo recast the field of the novel—historically deeper, geographically wider, morphologically broader. What are the implications for its theory? Prose, adventure and xiaoshuo as explanatory vectors; and prevalence of older power relations in the bourgeoisie’s hegemonic literary form.
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish -
The End of the Beginning
in NLR 41, September-October 2006, pp. 71-86
Subjects: History and Historiography , Literature
Franco Moretti responds to criticisms of his quantative approach to literary history, from Christopher Prendergast and Roberto Schwarz. Origins, upshots—and potential limitations?—of the abstract models developed in Graphs, Maps, Trees.
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish, Turkish and Slovenian -
Graphs, Maps, Trees - 3
in NLR 28, July-August 2004, pp. 43-63
Subjects: History and Historiography , Literature
After ‘graphs’ and ‘maps’, trees: can evolutionary theory help pattern the transformation of cultural forms and divergence of genres, through time and space? Franco Moretti’s final essay on abstract models for literary history.
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish, Turkish and Slovenian -
Graphs, Maps, Trees - 2
in NLR 26, March-April 2004, pp. 79-103
Subjects: History and Historiography , Literature
After ‘Graphs’ (see NLR 24), maps: geography, or social geometry? Literary spaces plotted as competing fields for industrialization, peasant rebellion, state formation. The second of Moretti’s three essays conceptualizing patterns of genre and history, form and force.
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish and Slovenian -
Graphs, Maps, Trees - 1
in NLR 24, November-December 2003, pp. 67-93
Subjects: History and Historiography , Literature
The first of three essays setting out to demonstrate the power of abstract models to revolutionize our understanding of literary history. What do the quantitative curves of novel production tell us about the interplay of markets, politics, sexes, generations, in the life and death of literary forms?
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish, Turkish and Slovenian -
More Conjectures
in NLR 20, March-April 2003, pp. 73-81
Subjects: Aesthetics , Anthropology , Literature
Replying to critics of his ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ (NLR 1), Franco Moretti considers the objections to a world-systems theory of the relations between centre and periphery in the sphere of the novel or poetry, and proposes some new hypotheses about the morphology of forms and the politics of comparative literary studies.
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish and Slovenian -
Planet Hollywood
in NLR 9, May-June 2001, pp. 90-101
Subjects: Cinema , World Economy and Globalization
The American film industry dominates world markets as never before. What is the geography of its grip on popular imaginations? Franco Moretti draws an international map of action films, comedies, children’s movies, dramas, with some intriguing results.
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish -
Markets of the Mind
in NLR 5, September-October 2000, pp. 111-115
Subjects: Media , United States
What does a survey of the fare in different videostores tell us about the social geography of big cities in the West? How should the quotient of violence in it be calibrated? The logic of the ghetto in today’s entertainment industry.
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish -
MoMA 2000: The Capitulation
in NLR 4, July-August 2000, pp. 98-102
Subjects: Aesthetics , Art
Time was when New York’s Museum of Modern Art plumed itself as an uncompromising guardian of Modernism. The arrival of its ‘themed’ re-hang—mimicked now at London’s Tate Modern—reduces a hundred years of defiguration to a stroll through an aesthetic department store.
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish -
'New York Times' Obituaries
in NLR 2, March-April 2000, pp. 104-108
Subjects: Media , United States
What do the obituaries in Manhattan’s leading daily tell us about the nervous system of America’s liberal democracy? The filters and foibles of the success story as a grid for social memory.
Read this article or download a PDF file
-
Conjectures on World Literature
in NLR 1, January-February 2000, pp. 54-68
Subjects: Aesthetics , Anthropology , Literature
Nearly two hundred years ago, Goethe announced the imminence of a world literature. Here Franco Moretti offers a set of hypotheses for tracking the birth and fate of the novel in the peripheries of Europe, in Latin America, Arab lands, Turkey, China, Japan, West Africa. For the first time, the prospect of a morphology of global letters?
Read this article or download a PDF file
Also available in Spanish, Turkish and Slovenian -
Modern European Literature: A Geographical Sketch
in NLR I/206, July-August 1994, pp. 86-109
Subjects: Aesthetics , Literature
Read this article or download a PDF file
-
Words Words Words: A Reply to Tony Pinkney
in NLR I/167, January-February 1988, pp. 127-128
Subjects: Aesthetics , Literature
Read this article or download a PDF file
-
The Spell of Indecision
in NLR I/164, July-August 1987, pp. 27-33
Subjects: Aesthetics , Literature
Read this article or download a PDF file
-
The Moment of Truth
in NLR I/159, September-October 1986, pp. 39-48
Subjects: Aesthetics
Read this article or download a PDF file
-
The Dialectic of Fear
in NLR I/136, November-December 1982, pp. 67-85
Subjects: Aesthetics , Literature
Read this article or download a PDF file
- Paradoxes of the Italian Political Crisis