Review by Booklist Review
Moretti, creator of the Stanford Literary Lab and a pioneer in the field of digital humanities, wants to democratize the study of literature and introduce those outside the academy to the nonlinear, nonprogrammatic manner in which artistic forms morph and change over time. Published here are five of his lectures, which set up a series of oppositions. He opens by contrasting Walt Whitman whose all-embracing spirit inspires Moretti's approach throughout this collection and Charles Baudelaire. The next lecture distinguishes Hemingway's use of repetitions from that of other modernists, and the third juxtaposes the western with film noir. After a brief foray through causality in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, the final lecture turns to the art world, concluding with a discussion of portraiture in Rembrandt and Warhol. Although Moretti draws on an almost exclusively white, male version of cultural history, these lectures are all surprisingly accessible, introducing a broader audience to Moretti's fresh approach to complex interpretation, his deep understanding of the Western canon, and the ways academic analysis can enrich one's experience of a work of art.--Alexander Moran Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"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. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Moretti (Distant Reading; The Bourgeois) is a leading proponent of literary computational analysis whereby large digital collections of literary texts are mined for historical and sociocultural meaning. This methodology is best exemplified by two of the six essays in this latest work. For example, "Walt Whitman or Charles Baudelaire?" examines sentence structure, repetition, modifiers, and the relation of adjectives to their nouns as seen in Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855) and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (1857). Moretti contends that Whitman's free verse reflects the unbounded, industrious, and democratic spirit that hallmarked 19th-century America, while Baudelaire's poetry mirrors the disjunctive, chaotic metropolis that was Paris. And in "Prose and History in `Big Two-Hearted River,'" Ernest Hemingway's simple, terse, and repetitive sentence structure epitomizes the soldier-character's inability to give voice to the brutal experience of war. Other pieces include a comparison of space, light, and the idea of legitimate violence in the Western and film noir genres, as well as the use of active and passive subjects in private and public space as demonstrated in the art of Vermeer and Edward Hopper. VERDICT For collections where Moretti's other titles are popular and academic holdings.-Lonnie Weatherby, McGill Univ. Lib., Montreal © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A literature professor invites us to sit in on some classes.The co-founder of Stanford's Literary Lab and Center for the Study of the Novel, Moretti (Emeritus, Humanities/Stanford Univ.; Distant Reading, 2013, etc.) collects an "odd quintet" of his university lectures on fiction, film, drama, and art and adds another, "Teaching in America," in which he bemoans the university acting like a store seeking "financial dreams," thus betraying "its intellectual purpose." The author clearly wants us to enjoy the "magic" of literature and then "filter it through the skepticism of critique" to acquire an "aesthetic education." He extracts short passages from the works discussed to analyze how language and style create form. In one of the best lectures, Moretti looks at how Hemingway's style in "Big Two-Hearted River"short sentences, a "spectacular" use of prepositional phrases, repetitionacts as a response to the never-mentioned World War I to create a "sort of retrospective exorcism of an unspeakable trauma." In "Walt Whitman or Charles Baudelaire?" Moretti picks the American when it comes down to the battle "between two incompatible conceptions of modern poetry." Indeed, Whitman provides "the fundamental model for a democratic aesthetics." In the engaging and insightful "Day and Night," Moretti examines the historical and antithetical significance between Westerns and film noir. "Words don't matter in the Western," he writes, whereas film noir is "unimaginable without words." After World War II, these two genres, writes the author, were critical to establishing American cultural hegemony. Next up, "Causality in Death of a Salesman": "American myths, everywhere: and they all turn to ashes." Lastly, and most ambitiously, there's a somewhat hopscotching piece on Vermeer and Hopper/Rembrandt and Warhol. Throughout, Moretti draws on a wide range of authors to assist him in his skeptical critiques.Fortunately, no grades are given out in these classes, just a "genuine intellectual experience" to learn from a first-rate literary critic. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
