Moretti's Graph, Maps,Trees

In Moretti's article, "Graph, Maps, Trees," he proposes a new way to study literature. Instead of the usual close reading we are all accustomed to, Moretti believes that studying literature as a whole will provide a broader analysis because we will only read less than one percent of all the novels in the world in our lifetime. By using graphs and statistical data he collected, Moretti describes the trends of literature according to historical and geographical factors.

This approach to analyzing literature can be helpful because it covers all the novels as a whole and provides information about the timeline of novels from different areas. This way, we can incorporate the novels that we will never get a chance to read. This method also provides logical reasons as to why there were fluctuations in the popularity of the novel and popularity of what genres the novel took. Since this method is based on facts and solid data, it cuts out the arguments and disagreements among interpretations of the novel.

Although facts are irrefutable and provide some insight on these trends, they do not encompass the essence of what literature is meant for. Authors did not write novels to simply tell a story that reflects their time period or popular genre at the time. Novels were written so that every reader can experience something different. By using a quantitative approach, it degrades the greatness of a single novel and its author. In other words, novels, even in a collective view are not simple enough to explain with data.

Other interdisciplinary projects that combine literature with numbers, graphs, and data should always keep an open mind on the events that cannot be put into numbers and curves. Even though accurate data can provide solid theories, there are two sides to a story. As long as there is equal attention to both the objective and subjective side of the project, there will be less information missed.

Another way to approach SSTLS is to compare the book with other dystopian or futuristic novels. We can compare the book to the genre it is in and discover why it is this type of novel instead of another. Instead o analyzing the subthemes in the novel separately, we can compare SSTLS’s themes with the similar themes in other novels within the same genre. This way we can explore more than one novel at a time as well.