John Berger, A Seventh Man: A Book of Images and Words about the Experience of Migrant Workers in Europe

A fascinating guide to Franco Moretti’s literary criticism

Experimental Criticism offers a series of close critical engagements with one of the world’s most innovative literary thinkers. Franco Moretti, author of such major works as Signs Taken for Wonders, The Way of the World, Modern Epic, Atlas of the European Novel and The Bourgeois, may be best known for his ‘distant reading’ of vast numbers of literary texts at the Stanford Literary Lab. Francesco de Cristofaro and Stefano Ercolino lead a lively exploration of his work as a springboard for rethinking the fundamentals of literary studies.

Topics include literary theory and method, problems of scale and canonisation, the evolution of literary forms, abstract modelling and the digital humanities, comparative versus world literature, Marxism and literary history, and tragedy and the novel. There are essays from Moretti himself on Lukács and the tensions between close and distant reading, plus a ‘provisional epilogue’ in which he reflects on his intellectual itinerary and the challenges posed by contributors to this volume. ‘Why study literature?’ he asks. For the pleasure of reducing complex things to their simple elements; to bring them back to earth.

This key retrospective amounts to a critical manifesto for an experimental literary materialism, one unafraid to test radical new hypotheses.