Franco Moretti: A Response

Extract

First of all, thanks to wai chee dimock, the editor of PMLA, and to all contributors for having put this feature together. Devoting time and energy to someone else's work is a very generous thing to do, and I'm grateful to all of you for your attention. Really.

Since Dimock made clear from the start that the discussion would be “on Distant Reading the book,” I will not address Johanna Drucker's and Catherine Nicholson's essays, which, though very interesting, concern methodological and historical issues rather than the book itself. Otherwise, my reply will proceed as follows: a prologue on my relationship to distance; some retrospective thoughts on Distant Reading; a few responses on “facts,” interpretations, “reading,” and “readers”; some reflections on modeling; and a conclusion on what Lisa Marie Rhody calls the “dehumanizing” nature of “scientific discourse.”