It’s an old stereotype: he who hates mathematics curls up with a book, and she who revels in numbers is bored by fiction. But Franco Moretti, an English professor at Stanford University, believes that a full understanding of literature requires mathematical tools. He is inventing a new school of literary history based on statistical analysis of data about novels rather than close readings of the texts themselves.
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“When we study literature, we really study a tiny, tiny portion of the literature that was actually published—around one percent,” Moretti says. To understand literary trends as a whole, he asserts, “Close reading won’t help: even if we read a novel a day every day of the year, it would take a century to read all the novels published in Britain in the 19th century.”