Network Theory, Plot Analysis

by Franco Moretti

The Stanford Literary Lab is proud to announce the publication of our second Pamphlet, “Network Theory, Plot Analysis” by Franco Moretti. Although this piece appeared recently in the New Left Review, it arrives here [the permission for which we thank the editorial board of NLR] with a greatly expanded collection of figures; an epilogue discussing the role of visualization for future directions in network-based plot analysis; and a brilliant in-house graphics design by Siri Huntoon. Also: since this particular pamphlet will remain a web-only publication, we especially appreciate your helping to spread the word about it.

42 pages, ebook

First published May 1, 2011

About the author

Franco Moretti is an Italian literary scholar, trained as a Marxist critic, whose work focuses on the history of the novel as a "planetary form". He has written five books, Signs Taken for Wonders (1983), The Way of the World (1987), Modern Epic (1995), Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 (1998), and Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (2005). His recent work is notable for importing, not without controversy, quantitative methods from the social sciences into domains that have traditionally belonged to the humanities. To date, his books have been translated into fifteen languages.

Moretti has recently edited a five-volume encyclopedia of the novel, entitled Il Romanzo (2004), featuring articles by a wide range of experts on the genre from around the world. It is available in a two-volume English language edition (Princeton UP, 2006).

Moretti earned his doctorate in modern literature from the University of Rome in 1972, graduating summa cum laude. He was professor of comparative literature at Columbia University before being appointed to the Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professorship at Stanford University. There, he founded the Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel. He has given the Carpenter Lectures at the University of Chicago, the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton, and the Beckman Lectures at the University of California-Berkeley. In 2006, he was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also has been a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a frequent contributor to the New Left Review and a member of Retort, a Bay Area-based group of radical intellectuals. He is also a scientific adviser to the French Ministry of Research.