Far Country
Scenes from American Culture
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The influential and controversial critic takes literary history out of the classroom and into the public
In the field of literary history and theory, Franco Moretti is synonymous with innovation. The cofounder of the Stanford Literary Lab, he brought quantitative methods into the study of the novel, enabling a “distant” reading that uses computation to analyze literary production over centuries. But at the same time, he was also teaching undergraduates the history of literature. Knowing Moretti, it’s no surprise that he didn’t teach the course the accepted way: one author after another, in a long uninterrupted chain. Instead, he put an irregular chessboard in front of his students that was too strange to be taken for granted. Literary history had become a problem, and he offered a solution.
In Far Country, Moretti take these lectures out of the classroom and lets us share in the passion and excitement that comes from radical critique. Unconstrained by genre, Moretti juxtaposes Whitman and Baudelaire, the Western and film noir, even Rembrandt and Warhol, illuminating each through their opposition. With his guidance, we revel in the process of transformation—the earthquakes that shook the “how” of artistic form—and begin to shape a new view on American culture.
Bracing in its insight and provocative in its conclusions, Far Country is a critical look at the development of American cultural hegemony.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Short in pages, and compressed in style," according to the author, this smart collection from Moretti (The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature), cofounder of the Stanford Literary Lab, takes five introductory lectures on literary history out of the classroom. His selections pair authors in unexpected ways, such as Walt Whitman and Charles Baudelaire, or Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce, or, branching out from literature, Jans Vermeer and Edward Hopper. Moretti has a penchant for grammatical analysis, at one point counting the number of prepositional phrases (25) in a passage from Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River." He observes that sentences such as "In his shirt the breast pockets bulged against him with his lunch and his fly book" tell the reader what the character has already done, so that action is implied, but "not really visible anymore." This interest in the invisible or the "missing thing" also gets applied to the use of repetition in Gertrude Stein's Three Lives (Moretti argues that the difficulty of Stein's language duplicates the problem of expressing one's inner state), and to the sense of mystery Vermeer creates about what might have happened just before the scene depicted in a painting. Learned without being difficult or jargony, Moretti proves that criticism can be both thought provoking and fun.
