Franco Moretti

Franco Moretti (born 1950 in Sondrio) is an Italian literary historian and theorist.

Born in Sondrio in 1950, he graduated in Modern Literatures from the University of Rome in 1972, after writing a dissertation on the British poets and intellectuals of the 1930s.

He graduated in Modern Literatures from the University of Rome in 1972.

He was initially a researcher at the Universities of Pescara and Rome (1972–1979), one of the founding editors of the journals Calibano and Il leviatano, and a contributor to the cultural pages of the new left daily newspaper il manifesto.

He played roles in three films directed by his brother: The Defeat (La sconfitta, 1973, short), Pâté de bourgeois (1973, short), and I Am Self Sufficient (Io sono un autarchico, 1976).

Moretti has made several contributions to literary history and theory.

Some ideas popularized by Moretti are traceable to earlier sources.

Opposing subjective interpretations of literature, Moretti proposed a number of materialistic, empirical approaches to literature and other arts.

His major contributions were in the domains of literary geography (now largely associated with Moretti's name ) and digital humanities; he also contributed to combining literary studies with the world-systems analysis and Darwinian theory of evolution.

Moretti has coined several concepts that are now widely used in the humanities, the main of which is distant reading.

Distant reading is opposed to close reading: a traditional approach in literary studies when a critic closely examines a separate text, traces all the possible intertextual connections.

Distant reading has the opposite goal: the scholar should "step back" from an individual text to see a larger picture: for example, the history of a genre during a century or the evolution of a particular artistic device over many decades.

In 1977–78 he was a Fulbright scholar at Occidental College.

He has taught at the universities of Salerno (1979–1983) and Verona (1983–1990); in the US, at Columbia (1990–2000) and Stanford (2000–2016), where in 2000 he founded the Center for the Study of the Novel, and in 2010, with Matthew Jockers, the Stanford Literary Lab.

Later, he taught English and Comparative Literature at the Universities of Salerno (1979–1983), Verona (1983–1990), Columbia (1990–2000) and Stanford (2000–2016), where in 2000 he founded the Center for the Study of the Novel, and in 2010, with Matthew Jockers, the Stanford Literary Lab .A volume collecting a selection of Literary Lab pamphlets has recently been translated into French, German, Spanish, and Italian, while individual pamphlets have appeared into more than a dozen languages, including Chinese, Russian, Turkish and Korean.

Later, two other allegations of harassment from the 1990s emerged, both denied by Moretti.

The Stanford Daily reported about a woman who recalled she had set a dog loose to stop Moretti’s unreciprocated advances; in that same Daily article, another graduate student at Johns Hopkins University said that Moretti had inappropriately touched her.

No formal proceeding of any sort was ever opened against him.

A Stanford spokesperson declared that the university was reviewing the case and "determining whether there are any actions for Stanford to take", and the process was concluded without any action ever being taken.

Moretti is currently emeritus professor at Stanford, and a "permanent fellow" at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the American Philosophical Society, and of the scientific board of the "Institute for World Literature" at Harvard.

He is a regular contributor to New Left Review, and has continued to advise doctoral students in various countries (Tartu, Lausanne, Harvard, Paris, Siena), receiving an honorary doctorate from Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj, and becoming a member of the Brno Narratological Circle.

His latest book – ''Far Country.

Over the years, Moretti has been visiting professor at various universities in Europe and North America – including Copenhagen, Toronto, La Sapienza, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris – twice a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1999–2000, 2012–2013), advisor of the French Ministry for Education, and member of the "Digital Humanities Institute" of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland (2016–2019). He has given the Gauss Seminars at Princeton, the Beckman Lectures at Berkeley, and the Carpenter Lectures at the University of Chicago, the Patten Lectures at Indiana University and the Iser lecture at the University of Konstanz.

The work of this "great iconoclast of literary criticism", as The Guardian once called him, has been translated into 30 languages, and has been the object of two collections of essays – ''Reading Graphs, Maps, Trees.

Critical Responses to Franco Moretti, in 2011, and Lire de près, de loin'', in 2014.

Moretti's conception of literary evolution in Distant Reading (2013) is quite similar to the psychologist Colin Martindale's (Clockwork Muse, 1990) "scientific," computational, neo-Darwinist project of literary evolution.

The role of reading is downplayed by both Martindale and Moretti.

Martindale's book has been largely ignored by literary scholars.

The essays Moretti collected in Distant Reading received in 2014 the prize of the "National Book Critics' Circle".

In 2017, Kimberly Latta accused Moretti, in a Facebook post, of having sexually assaulted her in 1985.

He denied the accusation, stating their relationship had been fully consensual.

According to Latta, Moretti threatened he would destroy her career if she spoke about his behavior, and she was afraid of being punished somehow for speaking out.

The Los Angeles Review of Books and PMLA have devoted special forums to his work, as has the Russian journal New Literary History in 2018, and the French journal Romantisme in 2021.

His work – and in particular the formula "distant reading", presented in the essay "Conjectures on World Literature" – has inspired books and journal issues, and generated work in the disparate fields of literary criticism, philosophy, political science, law, plus conferences and long-term research projects in several countries.

Most recently, Moretti's work has been examined in the collection Critica sperimentale, with contributions by Gisèle Sapiro, Patricia McManus, Guido Mazzoni, Francoise Lavocat, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Stefano Ercolino, Jérôme David and others.

Moretti has given the Gauss Seminars at Princeton, the Beckman Lectures at Berkeley, the Carpenter Lectures at the University of Chicago, and has been a lecturer and visiting professor in many countries, including, until the end of 2019, the Digital Humanities Institute at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

Franco Moretti is an Italian literary historian and theorist.

Scenes from American Culture, published simultaneously in Italy, the United States and Britain in 2019 – is framed by a long reflection on his first and last university courses, that covers the years from 1979 to 2016; the German edition – Ein fernes Land'', Konstanz University Press, 2020 – has been saluted as a "future standard for the field" and "a mandatory reading for all those who are beginning to study the humanities".

During the pandemic of 2020–22, Moretti has continued to give lectures online for audiences in Copenhagen, Berlin, Delhi, Naples, São Paulo and more.

He is the brother of Italian filmmaker and Palme d'Or-winner Nanni Moretti.