Conjectures on World Literature (2000)

In this essay, Franco Moretti moots a new interpretative method called “distant reading.” He begins by pointing out how the study of world literatures has not lived up to its potential, given how it by necessity focuses on regions and time periods. Moretti points out that close reading is not equipped to do so, given how it focuses on extremely small canons. Instead, he suggests that we need to take a distant view, in which we synthesize existing works. Thus, literary history becomes “second hand”—a patchwork of other people’s research, without a single direct textual reading.