"A Tale of Two Practices. Literary Studies between Hermeneutics and Quantification"

What relationship, between the quantitative literary history of the past twenty years, and the older hermeneutic-interpretive tradition? Answers have typically been of two kinds: for many in the interpretive camp, the two approaches are incompatible, and the newer one has hardly any value; for most quantitative researchers, they are perfectly compatible, and in fact complementary. Writing these pages has convinced me of a third possibility, that will emerge from a comparison of how the two strategies work. How they work, literally; in the conviction that practices – what we learn to do by doing, by professional habit, and often without being fully aware of what we are doing – have frequently larger theoretical implications than theoretical statements themselves. In other words: trying to understand what a research paradigm does, rather than what it declares it wants to do.

Franco Moretti is Emeritus Professor in the Department of English at Stanford University, where he founded the Center for the Study of the Novel and the Literary Lab, and Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. Amongst over a dozen influential and widely-translated monographs on the Novel, World-Systems Theory, and Literary Geography, his award-winning 2013 book Distant Reading has become the foundational text in computational literary studies and the Digital Humanities.

Scientific Organization: Leonardo Impett

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