distant reading

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a methodological approach in literary studies coined by Franco Moretti to describe the use of computational and quantitative methods to analyse very large corpora of literary texts — thousands or millions of books — rather than the close reading of individual canonical works; distant reading treats literature as a system and asks aggregate questions about genre evolution, thematic patterns, narrative structures, and the social diffusion of literary forms that cannot be answered by traditional humanistic methods focused on the interpretation of specific texts; Moretti's proposal was provocative because it explicitly challenged the centrality of close reading to literary scholarship, arguing that the literary field's fixation on a small canon of texts distorts understanding of literature as a historical and social phenomenon