بورژوا: در میانه تاریخ و ادبیات

by Franco Moretti, مهران مهاجر، محمد نبوی

«بورژوا...در روزگاری نه چندان دور کاربرد این مفهوم در تحلیل اجتماعی ناگریز به نظر می رسید؛امروزه روز،اما،شاید سال ها بگذرد این کلمه به گوش مان نخورد.سرمایه داری قدرتمند تر از هر زمانی است،اما تجسم فردی آن گویا ناپدید شده است.ماکس وبر در 1895 نوشت:«من عضوی از طبقه ی بورژوا هستم خود را بورژوا احساس می کنم،و با آرمان ها و ایدئال های آن بزرگ شده ام».امروزه چه کسی می تواند از «آرمان ها و ایدئال های»بورژوایی سخن بگوید؟-این آرمان ها و ایدئال ها چه هستند؟
فرانکو مورتی کار بررسی بورژوا در ادبیات مدرن اروپایی را این چنین آغاز می کند.او در این بررسی نمایشگاهی از چهره های افراد را با تحلیل کلید واژه هایی چند و دگرگونی هایی که به نثر خود دیده است در می آمیزد،و از باب «ارباب-کارگر»فصل آغازین کتاب به نقد بنیادی اییبسن بر فرهنگ بورژوایی در فصل پایانی می رسد،و در این میان با کندو کاو در دلایل ضعف تاریخی آن و بلا موصضوع بودن امروزین اش،پست و بلند فرهنگ بورژوایی را ترسیم می کند.
«سنت شکن بزرگ در عرصه نقد ادبی»-جان ساتر لند،گاردین
«در محافل ادبی،مورتی به خاطر رویکرد داده محورش مشهور است.او این روش را به مدد ترسیم نمودار و طرح و نقشه پیش می برد.اگر این روش ها جا بیفتند،نگاه ما به تاریخ ادبی عوض خواهد شد»-وایرد

Genres: History, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Theory, Sociology, Literature, Criticism

224 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2013

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.

Reviews

[Uroš Đurković · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ako je neko danas globalna faca u proučavanju književnosti to je Franko Moreti. Kroz ideju distant reading-a i primenu grafova i mapa u proučavanju književnosti, Moreti se nametnuo kao jedna od lucidnijih figura u proučavanju književnosti, čije ideje rezoniraju sa horizontom savremenosti. Naizgled paradoksalno – udaljavanje od teksta trebalo bi da nas ponovo vrati tekstu, koji bi u drukčijem svetlu progovorio u svojoj punoći.

Mada, ako mene pitate, to je sve priča digitalne humanistike kao borbe za novu organizaciju znanja. Sada, kao nikada u istoriji, moguće je doći do najrazličitijih podataka – klikneš na search i za pola minuta izdvoje ti se sve odabrane reči jednog dela. Kopiraš listu i vraćanje na primere može ti dati neku istinu o celini dela. Takođe, mogu se relativno lako videti i neke sintaksičke obeleženosti, poput, koji glagol ide uz koju imenicu. Za sve to, pre koju deceniju, neko je morao danima da džedži u institutu i uz lupu, filološki kažiprst i beskrajno strpljenje, beleži sve što se beležiti treba. Spram toga, današnja lakoća u prikupljanju podataka deluje gotovo bezobrazno.

Ali šta je Moreti ovim metodom pronašao? Učestalost korišćenja reči industry kod Robinzona Krusoa, koja nam ukazuje kako se u građanskoj kulturi domišljatost zamenila idealom napornog rada (39); razmišljanje o kategoriji korisnosti (41) i učinkovitosti (48); kategoriji ozbiljnosti kod Vermera (74–75); kako Gete oživljava svakodnevicu osećajem mogućnosti (81); kako suspregnutost trenutnih želja čini kulturu (92) (koju, opet, objašnjava kod Defoa u odnosu na upotrebu sedam suprotnih veznika u jednom pasusu, što treba uzeti sa zrncem soli); da je slobodni neupravni govor kod Flobera izraz gubitka didaktičke funkcije književnosti (100) ili (viktorijanskim) preporukama za uspešnog radniga u knjizi „Samopomoć” Samjuela Smajlsa (126), proze kao građanskog bivanja u književnosti (177)...

I čini se, naročito ovako predstavljeno, da Moretijeva knjiga predstavlja zbir ulančanih usputnosti koje nemaju snagu književnoistorijske vizije jednog problema. One jesu često zanimljive, ali još češće nisu razrađene, što nisam siguran da je dobar pravac u proučavanju. Ipak, svako ko hoće da se stručno bavi književnošću 19. veka, treba ovo pročitati. Posebno preporučujem poslednje poglavlje, posvećeno Ibzenu i odatle izdvajam jedan odlomak:

„(...) Mašta detalje čini sićušnima: mogućnost stvarnost čini beznačajnom. To je poezija kapitalističkog razvoja.
Poezija mogućeg. Ranije sam rekao da je velika građanska vrlina poštenje. Ali poštenje je retrospektiva: pošteni ste ako u prošlosti niste učinili ništa loše. Ne možete biti pošteni u budućnosti – a budućnost je vrijeme poduzetnika. Što je to ”pošteno” predviđanje cijene nafte, ili bilo čega drugog, pet godina u budućnost? Ne možete biti pošteni čak i da to želite, jer poštenje zahtijeva čvrste dokaze kakve ”spekulaciji” – čak i u najneutralnijem smislu reči – nedostaju.” (180)

[Sir Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Bourgeois existence, and conservative belief: such is the foundation of the realist novel, from Goethe to Austen, Scott, Balzac, Flaubert, (Thackeray, the Goncourts, Fontane, James....). To this small miracle of equilibrium, free indirect style contributed the final touch.”

Granted, there are some pretty heavy conservatives in the above list of authors. But as you might expect from a Marxist literary scholar, Moretti seems to see “conservatism” lurking behind some of the most fundamental novelistic techniques.

In discussing the apparent undermining of the narrator that the free indirect style ushers in, for example, he concludes as follows when comparing a more “autocratic” author (Pinard) to the seemingly liberal and freethinking one (Flaubert): “From this second viewpoint, Pinard and Flaubert do not stand for, respectively, repression and critique, but rather for an obsolete and stolid form of social control, and a more flexible and effective one.”

This viewpoint is the one Moretti endorses, that Flaubert’s techniques are basically just a more sophisticated form of narrative fascism.

Marxist scholars sniff out conservatism in the most innocent-seeming places. (It is always taken as a given that conservatism is inherently hostile to all forms of existence.) Any society that is not in the midst of violent upheaval is conservative. And any literary description of such a place is also inherently conservative, since “though this or that individual description may indeed have been relatively neutral [a la Flaubert]--description as a form was not neutral at all: its effect was to inscribe the present so deeply into the past that alternatives became simply imaginable.” There you have it: If you describe things too well, it's a conservative act, since you etch these vivid impressions of the contemporary indelibly on the reader’s mind, and make this reader unable politically to comprehend the possibility of a different social structure.

It is notable that in this 200-page book that covers large swaths of 18th- and 19th-century literature, there is not one example brought forth of what a nonconservative, liberal/radical narrative would be. The lesson seems to be that fiction is inherently conservative. Austen is conservative because of the way her narrators tyrannically judge her characters’ thoughts. Flaubert, on the other hand, withholds judgment and disappears into his narrations, and yet this too is somehow seen as being conservative. There is truly no way out. The universe is conservative.

And as the passage quoted up top shows, even free indirect style is implicated! Moretti manages to see this method as a kind of sneaky totalitarianism on behalf of the narrator, whereas one could (and should) see it as the opposite: Free indirect style is actually the narrator loosening authority and letting the characters’ verbiage take over. If anything it’s a kind of grassroots movement within a literary text.

Of course, we will never know how a great Marxist novelist would handle such narrative devices, because there has never been a great Marxist writer. And yet, Marxists cannot leave literature alone. What an odd thing it is, really, if you take a step back, that Marxists in academia are so often primarily attracted not to poli sci, sociology, or history…. but to literature! It’s as if no other field wanted them, and English departments were just desperate enough to let them in.

But let’s move on from this tirade; because really The Bourgeois is a ruminative, dense, hugely enjoyable book for anyone who is into literature.

One of Moretti’s guiding ideas is that fiction is a space where societal resolutions are preserved, while the dissonances have vanished from sight. And that thus you should be able to “reverse engineer from this point to go back to the original dissonances to unlock a dimension of the past that would otherwise remain hidden.” Literature is the stuff that doesn’t show up in the stats, details of existence you would never know if it weren’t for literature. At the same time, its image of the world is an image, not a record of facts, and yet literature engages with these facts, and its image is dependent upon and impacted by actual historical and sociological stuff. It reflects and distorts reality for its own purposes. Moretti realizes he’s going after an elusive and possibly illusive quarry by attempting to see through literary texts into the politics of everyday reality, but it’s a commendable search.

It is 19th-century England that seems to be Moretti’s primary focus. He begins by pointing out that in English the word bourgeois was pushed aside in favor of middle class, especially in the US where there is no tradition of an aristocracy. There is no bourgeois-like word in the English language; we take it directly from the French, whereas in German and other European languages there is a direct bourgeois equivalent. Moretti posits that the term middle class came about because there was a social need for there to be such a class between the nobility and the working class and peasants. This middle class was always plagued by a sense of illegitimacy and a lack of cohesion; they didn't engage in traditional labor (cobbler, blacksmith, bricklayer, so on) and had no traditional guilds or associations, and no matter how much wealth they accumulated they would always be looked down on by the aristocracy. They didn't quite belong anywhere, because within this middle class there was immense differentiation and less solidarity than there was in the lower and higher economic classes.

Because of this Moretti holds that the bourgeoisie was better at exerting power in the economic sphere than it was in creating a culture and establishing a political presence. When it came to politics, the bourgeois tended to defer to the aristocracy. In culture, too, the bourgeois often aped the values of the wealthy.

Some of the best stuff in the book is when Moretti analyzes how word usage shifts through time. He does this using the literary lab and some fancy software that’s able to pick out linguistic tics. In Robinson Crusoe (published 1719), for example, words like heavy or dark apply purely to the weight of an object and the absence of light, respectively. But in the course of the next century, such adjectives are increasingly metaphorical in English fiction. In Our Mutual Friend (published 1865), heavy is applied to the following: frown, eyes, sighs, charges, grudges, reflections; dark is applied to sleep, combination, frown, smile, business, look, cloud of suspicion, and so on. “Their point is no longer to contribute to the ‘literal accuracy’ . . . but to convey miniature value judgments. Not description, but evaluation.” And the finding from analyses of tens of thousands of novels written during this period bear out the fact that such words came to be used in increasingly metaphorical ways. It’s exhilarating that novels can now be studied in such a way.

In another vein, Moretti discusses a kind of crisis of natural description. Starting with the following quote from Lukacs: “We have invented the productivity of the spirit.... And our thinking follows the endless path of approximation that is never fully accomplished . . . everything that falls from our . . . hands must always be incomplete.” This is tied to another statement from Lukacs: “The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.” Without God, there is no end, no completion, no ultimate truth; all that’s left is wandering and continual approximations. Moretti ties this thought to the steady accumulation of details in novels: “The better prose becomes at multiplying the concrete details that enrich our perception of the world [i.e., the better prose becomes at production] the more elusive is the reason for doing so.” The more and more you push approximation, the more you seek, the further you get from “meaning,” I think this is what he’s saying. Moretti argues that the 19th-century fiction would bifurcate between this choice: “Productivity, or meaning.” And this brings you to ruminations about some of the most basic attributes of novels, such as why have all these fillers that “don’t do much” and take up the majority of most novels?

[Al Maki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moretti sees literature as the fossilized remains of social issues that were alive in the past but no longer. So the novel can be used to shed light on historical questions. I would say he is applying to literature the method that the Annales School brought to history: set aside the examination of the particular and look at statistical patterns. In his case the data are syntax and semantics. He draws on a database of several thousand novels to study trends in language to draw inferences about the development of the novel. In this book he studies the development of the "bourgeois" from the early 18th century to the end of the 19th. What do patterns in language use show about the concerns of the bourgeoisie of the early seventeen hundreds when the novel was born and how did those change over the next 200 years? It might sound boring to those who don't have a quantitative bent (I do) but I found the ideas fascinating and the writing supple and lively.
The question of the bourgeoisie and the novel also happens to interest me. It occurred to me while reading Zeno's Confessions that just as there are romantic novels and picaresque novels there are also novels where the central fact is the protagonist's capital, i.e. bourgeois novels. Moretti has developed the question in considerable depth.
It's not an easy book and benefited from a second reading.

[David M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant and incisive. In my opinion Moretti is at his best when he forgets about his research program for quantifying the evolution of the novel. It strikes me as ironic that such a subtle and insightful reader would want to turn the study of literature into an exact science. I tend to think such aspirations are bound to lead to a diminishment of meaning without any real gain in rigor. Generally the province of philistines, but Moretti decidedly is not that that.

[M L Delshad · Rating 4 out of 5]

مورتی در این اثر، فرهنگ بورژوایی را با خوانش ادبیات هم آیند دوره بسط اولیه سرمایه داری می آغازد. سوال اساسی اما ساده او این است: بورژوازی چه به ارمغان آورد؟ اگر اشرافیت تراژدی و طبقه پایین کارناوالیتی و هجو را به فرهنگ هدیه کرد، بورژوازی دقیقا چه آورده ای داشت؟
ِپاسخ مورتی این است: شکاف حل ناشدنی میان وضوح و ابهام. میان نثرپرتوصیف رئالیستی و ناعقلانیت قفس آهنینِ وبری.
مورتی بهترین نمونه این ��کاف را در نمایشنامه های ایبسن می یابد. اما با کمی تامل می شود مصادیق بیشماری از این خصیصه فرهنگ بورژوایی را در نظر آورد: هر چه باشد جهان خالی از توصیفات و خودویرانگر کافکا و دنیای واژگان بدیع و لایه های بی پایان داستانی جویس هر دو محصولات فرهنگ بورژوایی اند.
........................
کتاب را نشر آگه با ترجمه عالی مهران مهاجر و محمد نبوی منتشر کرده است.
به علاقه مندان به مطالعات فرهنگی، جامعه شناسی و ادبیات بسیار توصیه می شود.

[Arezoo Ahmi · Rating 4 out of 5]

مهم، مخصوصاً برای خود بورژوای کتابخوان.

[Vendedor de rápida · Rating 4 out of 5]

Otro gran ensayo de Franco Moretti, con menos datos cuantitativos y gráficos que en otros libros suyos, su capacidad para captar los conceptos claves de la cultura burguesa a través de la literatura del siglo XIX es clarividente y llena de descubrimientos e ideas felices. Esta lectura es un placer para adentrarse en la novela realista y saber que su prosa es uno de los grandes inventos de la burguesía y la revolución industrial.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that reminded me why I've dedicated the last ten years of my life to Marxist literary criticism. Yes, it has its problems - don't we all? - but the insights afforded by its blindnesses are amazing. A brilliant book - and a page-turner at that.

[Anton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Critics say: so good you won't even know it's distant reading.

[GÜRSEL SOYBIR · Rating 5 out of 5]

BURJUVAZİ, kendini biçimsel olarak astlarından ayıramaz, varlığının doğası gereği, kapısını açık tutmak zorundadır (Hobsbawn).

Aristokrasi, medeni ünvanları ve yargısal ayrıcalıkları birleştiren statüsüyle tanımlanırken; işçi sınıfının sınırları temelde emeğinin koşullarına göre belirlenir; burjuvazinin ise kıyaslanmaya uygun bir İÇ BİRLİĞİ YOKTUR.

Bir köylü ya da serf değil, bir soylu da değil, esrarengiz bir yaratık, HEM İDEALİST HEM MADDİYATA DÜŞKÜN, uzlaşması imkansız daimi bir çarpışma (Wallerstein, Simon Schama, Machivelli, Warburg).

17yy Fransa (BURGEİS): Feodal yargıdan özgür ve muaf olma yasal hakkını kullanan, ne ruhbana ne soyluluğa ait olan; beden işçiliği yapmayan; çalışmaksızın elde ettiği geliri olan grup.

Yoksullukla, cehennem azabı arasında acımasız seçim riskine girmeksizin, ihtiyaç ya da vicdanın emirleri doğrultusunda, kutsal ve dünyevi olan arasında hareket edebilecek bir alan sağlamıştır kendine. Beden işçiliği yapıp sıkıntı çeken kesime ve üst tabakanın, kibir, lüks alışkanlık, hırs ve kıskançlığına aynı uzaklıktadır.

Enerji, kendine hakimiyet, entellektüel netlik, ticari dürüstlük, güçlü hedef anlayışları iyi özellikleridir ama bunlar; savaşçı şövalye, fatih ve maceracı kahramanlarla boy ölçüşemez.
Schumpeter; “Menkul kıymetler borsası, kutsal kasenin yerini tutamaz”.

Hayatı; kahraman olmaya değil, korkak olmaya yazgılıdır. Zenginler, soyut ilkeler için ölmez.

Efendisi olmayan burjuva, sanki bir başkasıymışçasına yalnızca kendi için çalışır.

Dönüşüm tarihi, kapitalist maceraperest ile başlar, çalışan efendiye geçiş olur.
Macera kültürü ile rasyonel çalışma ahlakı arasında karşıtlık vardır. İkincisinin, modern Avrupa kapitalizmine özgü olduğuna şüphe yok.

Tutarsızlık sadece biçimde değildir. Fenotipi, kendi iki ruhu arasında çözümlenmemiş diyalektikten doğar. Weber’in aksine bu durum, rasyonel burjuvanın irrasyonel dürtülerinden vazgeçemeyeceğini, içinde yaşattığı hayvanı bedeninden çıkarıp atamayacağını anlatır.

Dinlenme kaybolmuştur, her şey FAYDA içindir. Herşey, daima bir başka şeyi yapmak için bir araçtır, bir alettir, aletler dünyasında yapılacak tek şey çalışmaktır. Bir eylem daima bir başka şeyi yapmak içindir.
Dünya Hegel’in “düz akıl” ya da “araç amaç” ya da kategorileriyle anlaşılır. Buna Weber, amaçsal rasyonalizasyon, amacına yönelmiş rasyonalite; Horkheimer ise “araçsal akıl” der.

Faydalı olan, dünyayı aletler koleksiyonuna dönüştürür, iş bölümü ise, aletleri amaçlarına uygun kullanmayı, yani VERİMLİLİĞİ sağlar.

ÇALIŞMA AHLAKI, burjuvayı, neye hizmet ettiğinin önemi olmadan, işini iyi yapmaya zorlar.

Onur arsitokrasi için neyse, DÜRÜSTLÜK orta sınıf için odur. Tacirin sözü altın gibi kıymetlidir.

KONFOR, haz ve tatmin sağlayan şeydir. Rahatlama; hastalıktan değil, çalışmaktan kurtulacak kadardır, refaha evet ama, görev aşkını bitirecek kadar değil.

DEVAMLILIK ve geri döndürülemezliğin ritmi vardır. Buna Hegel, “modernitenin temposu yokoluş çılgınlığıdır” der.

KESİNLİK; doğrudan işe yaramasa da, ayrıntıları önemseyen bir zihniyetin inşa edilmesidir. Bedeli, bütünlüğün devre dışı kalmasıdır.

Burjuva çalışma kültürü irrasyonelliğinde ÜRETKENLİK ve ANLAM karşılaştırılamaz.

CİDDİYET; egemen sınıf olma yolundaki halinin adıdır. Hegel; bireyin kendini, başkaları için araca dönüştürerek, onların sınırlı amaçlarına hizmet ettiği ve aynı şekilde, başkalarını da kendi menfaatleri için araca indirgediği bir dünyadan bahseder.

Yöntem, güvenirlik, düzen ve netlik, gerçekçilik ve hassasiyet gibi kavramlar İLKE ve DEĞERE dönüşmüştür. İlkelerin peşinden koşulması ÇİLECİ KAHRAMANLIK’tır. Çelişki burada başlar; estetik başarılar ne kadar radikalleşirse, resmettiği dünya o kadar yaşanmaz olur.

ÖZNELLİK azaldığı için, benliğin kimi yanlarının bastırılması olan NESNELLİK artar.

19yy ücretli emek sözleşmesi eşitsizliğine karşı, ideolojik olarak, PATRİARKAL EFENDİ KÖLE İLİŞKİSİ’ni canlandırır. İşçilerin uysallığı karşılığında, tüm hayatları boyunca geçindirme sözü veren, “adamlarım yeteri kadar yiyeceğimiz var mı?” paternalizmidir bu.

Kültür ehli insanlar, bilgiyi; kaba, inceliksiz, mesleki, soyut, zor ve dışa kapalı şeylerden arındırmak, insanileştirmek, okumuşların dar çevresinin dışında etkili kılmak için emek harcadılar.
Özgür eğitim almışların rahatlığı, zarafeti ve çok yönlülüğü denen şey; Ruskin’in mekanik kesinliğe karşı verdiği savaş; ya da Arnold’un en ayırt edici niteliğim dediği HOŞ SOHBET OLMAK budur.

Orta sınıf DİLİ MÜPHEMDİR; ayırım yapmayan radikal kapsayıcılık ile muhafazakar dışlayıcılık arasında durur.
Sürekli bir tema ortaya atılır, geliştirilir, abartılır, rasyonalize edilip kenara bırakılır.

Çağdaş ruhun ve kitapların en ayırıcı özelliği; insanlara ve şeylere ilişkin ahlaki yargıları, yavaş yavaş cıvıklaştıran, utanç verici ahlakileştirilmiş konuşma biçimidir (Nietzche).

Orta sınıf, üst tabaka evlilikleri ile ARİSTOKRASİYE BAZEN YAKLAŞIR ve seçkinlerin, zenginlere nüfus edebilirliği gösterilir, bazen de sınıflar arası engellerin aşılamazlığı vurgulanır.
Aşık olunan kadın üzerinden Avrupa’ya, bu aristokratik aşkı hayal edebilecek kadar yakın, gerçekleştiremeyecek kadar uzaktır.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's no doubt that Moretti is a brilliant and deeply original critic, and there is no doubt that he is reading through a loosely Marxist filter that isolates the linkages coordinating literary expression with the economic organization of society. There is also little doubt that these linkages exist in some form, and Moretti makes a persuasive case for their bearing on core elements of the European 19th century novel. But he appears to be a Marxist without teleology, which is welcome, although it leaves the book with an unfinished feel (it lacks a conclusion), and sets up for disappointment any reader who hoped the book would answer the question posed by Moretti in his introduction, and repeated by the publishers on the book flap: What has happened to the bourgeois, who was once everywhere and is now - in literature at least - nowhere, despite the persistence and intensification of modern capitalism? This question is raised, and dropped. What follows is a series of brief an penetrating analyses of the realist novel and what makes it 'bourgeois'. Moretti begins with Defoe and ends with Ibsen, tracing a narrative arc that more or less parallels that of Weber's sociological model of rationalization and disenchantment, and leaves it at that. What has happened in the last century of narrative fiction, how the mutations of what is now called literary fiction have tracked with the mutations of capitalism, and just where the bourgeois fits in to it - if at all - is unaddressed.

There are times when the reader might feel Moretti is veering too close to Lukács' later, reductive writings on bourgeois irrationalism, but Moretti is more subtle and mindful of the need to be what some would approvingly call dialectical. This is nowhere more apparent than in in the application of his trademark quantitative analysis of adjectives in the Victorian novel.

Up to now, through a series of small and large choices - the grammar of irreversibility, the rejection of allegorical significance, the 'verbose' search for accuracy, the 'speculation crushed' of the reality principle, the analytical respect for details, the stern objectivity of free indirect style - bourgeois prose had moved in the general direction of Weberian disenchantment: a striking advance in precision, variety, and consistency - but an advance that could no longer 'teach us anything about the meaning of the world.' [Weber] Well, Victorian adjective are all about meaning. In their world, all that is, has some moral significance.

At a sort of molecular level accessible only with the assistance of lexical databases, Moretti shows how Victorian adjectives ceased to be used to describe things, as they had in early novels such as Robinson Crusoe, and began to multiply in the description of moral and psychological states. The result is the moralized prose of the Victorian novel that, in combination with the rise of the free indirect style, succeeds in delivering elaborate descriptions of the world cloaked in moral evaluation. This is the kernel of Moretti's understanding of Victorianism, best illustrated by his image of the Houses of Parliament, rebuilt after the social tumult of the post-Napoleonic period and in the midst of the industrial transformation of the English countryside as a giant medieval fantasia, the function of modern architecture wrapped in the forms of earlier cultural consensus that bourgeois culture alone could not provide - the Gothic in architecture, the medieval in pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting, and the elite insistence, made clear in Tennyson, that beauty must prevail over the truth of nature red in tooth and claw, despite much contrary evidence.

The Victorian dynamic is only one case, however, and Moretti has much to say of interest about bourgeois literature on the periphery of nineteenth century capitalist development, as well as the inverse of Victorianism in the form of a book like Madame Bovary and French realism. But what ties them all together, he argues, is the concern for precision in description, and the expansion of this aimless descriptive content so that it may capture the routinization of daily life, the background overcoming the foreground to such an extent that it becomes difficult to understand, in some cases, what is happening, or why the reader should bother slogging on through Proust, or Middlemarch, or Buddenbrooks.

And because the modern novel cannot of itself resolve the structural tensions of modern capitalism that it expresses, neither does Moretti make the attempt. Rather, somewhat like Conrad's Marlow, who penetrates to the horrible truth after steaming upstream through layers of metaphor and euphemism, or like Ibsen's Hattie, who speaks the truth to her ethically compromised husband, and then walks into the night, he leaves us before the abyss of contradiction.

[Emanuel Lupaşcu · Rating 5 out of 5]

must read

[srmtn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Se acchiappo chi ha deciso di mettere le note dei saggi Einaudi a fine volume……

[Michael Meeuwis · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's a really, really good bit towards the beginning of this book, where the electronic analysis of patterns in a large corpus of literarature is used to say some really interesting things about eighteenth-century literature. It's a bit of a sharp fall from there. By the end, this becomes less analysis than free-association; and although some of those associations are interesting, there's very little evidence behind them. Some of the statements are given at such a level of generality that I question whether they're really interesting: although, for example, it might be accurate to write that disavowal is what defined the Victorian period, it would also be accurate to write the opposite. Any one of many interesting threads that this book picks up might, through analysis and argument, be developed into something conclusive. Without this work, however, it's hard to know how seriously to take any of this. It's sort of up to you to decide whether Moretti's professional celebrity is an adequate substitution for rigor.

[Khitkhite Buri · Rating 3 out of 5]

With caveats then; redeeming what literary critique has meant to me, what all my anxious excursions into political realism has undone. Inconclusive, but we knew that in the introduction. Hopeful and indebted, there. Helps that this is marxist, helps that it is also excited about words and etymology. This was a good return. And a hasty review, because I'd rather think elsewhere, and I have things to make.

[Daniel Benevides · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moretti é um crítico literário original, de uma erudição impressionante. Com ele, aprendemos não apenas sobre literatura, mas muito sobre a nossa sociedade. Seus livros são também grandes estímulos para a leitura de tudo o que ele comenta e de obras afins. Ou seja, Moretti é um provocador, mas também um guia.

[Devon]

this was not an easy book to understand (i did not understand :(((((( )

[Steve Bowbrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another mind-expanding read from the New Left Review crew, in this case from the journal's resident literary historian of over thirty years.

The bourgeois is the main character in 19th Century literature - the rational, dynamic, acquisitive hero who speaks in 'free indirect style' without the pious judgements and pompous authorial voice of pre-capitalist literature.

The dynamism of the capitalist against the stasis of the landowner elite.

The radicalism of Austen, Eliot, James, Mann, Flaubert and authors I've never heard of - Verga and Galdós, Prus, Goncharov...

Gripping, surprising analysis of Ibsen's revolutionary plays.

Time spent on Crusoe's island where we learn about his entrepreneurialism and his weird work ethic.

Fascinating statistical analysis of the corpus of early-modern and modern literature - looking for patterns in use of adjectives, voices, nouns, different words for 'middle class' and 'things'.

A brilliant book that fizzes with ideas, all of which are a direct challenge to the fusty British critical tradition and to parochial, non-political literary thought.

[Inna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant book on how confident culture-buliding bourgeoisie turned into the middle classes, desperately trying to adopt existing cultural concepts to justify their existence. And on prose as the ultimate bourgeois writing style.

[Caracalla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting stuff, particularly earlier on in the essay on Robinson Crusoe and on Wilhelm Meister. Maybe it doesn't quite tie together at the end but I found his statistical methods very persuasive. I hope to read other things by him later

[Stefano · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intuizioni preziose, ampio respiro e prosa informale. S'impara molto su temi e forme letterarie sette-ottocentesche. Poco sul "borghese". #tweetReview