From: William Benzon (bbenzon@mindspring.com)
Date: Wed 25 Jan 2006 - 05:29:44 GMT
Posted over at The Valve, where we're discussing Franco Moretti's *Graphs,
Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History.* I've written a piece
on Xanadu.
Bill B
* * * * * *
One Candle, a Thousand Points of Light: Moretti and the Individual Text
As my review makes clear, I hold Morettiıs work in high regard; I like it
and I want to see more like it. Beyond that, I too believe that we need to
bracket the search for meaning and put it on the shelf. I do not, however,
believe that requires us to shift our attention away from the scrupulous
examination of individual texts. I have argued that point in a series of
posts on this site and, more importantly, I have shown how to do it in a
small body of critical studies written and published over a period of three
decades.
That leaves me with one major issue: How do we bridge the yawning chasm
between the phenomena Moretti examines and the particularity of individual
texts and individual acts of reading, apprehension, and discussion? I
certainly do not have an answer to that question, nor do I think anyone
does. But I would like to have a little fun playing around in that chasm and
thereby indicate something of what can be done. My objective is to convince
you that that "space" is not a chasm at all, but "fertile ground" containing
gardens "bright with sinuous rills" interspersed among "forests ancient as
the hills."
I take as one starting point Steven Johnsonıs remark that "a systemic theory
has to work at all the relevant scales." Iıve done most of my work at the
scale appropriate for an individual reading a single text. To get from that
scale to Morettiıs we need to consider many readers reading many texts over
the course of years, decades, and centuries. That is to say, the phenomena
Moretti examines are summary measures of the activities of a population of
individuals over decades-long periods of time. As my other starting point I
have Sean Mcannıs wonder over Morettiıs "stunner of a line" about deducing
operative forces from an objectıs form.
Iıve chosen "Kubla Khan" as my example. I have two reasons for doing so. On
the one hand I am familiar with the poem and have a reasonable grasp of its
form. Beyond my work, there is the rather different but complementary work
of Reuven Tsur and some unpublished analytical work by Richard Cureton. On
the other hand, the poem is about, among other things, a place called
Xanadu, and that word, that meme if you will, is rather wide-spread. If you
google the term you get roughly 2,000,000 hits Iıve gotten as few as 1.6M
and on one occasion I got 7M; I have no idea what accounts for that upper
figure. Thatıs the Xanadu cultural system, or rather, a highly distributed
manifestation of the Xanadu cultural system. With 2M hits, itıs on the
world-wide scale at which Moretti is operating.
Continued at:
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