Franco Moretti: The Road to Rome. Literary studies between hermeneutics and quantification (BRNK)

Can the quantitative literary history of the past twenty years, and the older hermeneutic tradition, join forces and establish a new, synthetic conceptual framework for the study of literature? This is the question I will try to answer, by reflecting on how the two strategies work. How they work, literally; in the conviction that, as Oleg Sobchuk and I have recently written, “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.” With a complication, however: since both the quantitative and – even more so – the hermeneutic approach are actually many approaches, often sharply at odds with each other (a lacanian interpretation having nothing in common with a new historicist or an ecocritical one, and so on), I will restrict myself to work I have personally taken part in. This is of course a questionable decision, which I’m taking because I’ve been repeatedly taken aback by how different my work has ended up being in the two registers. In the case of a single person – where, if anything, the two sides should be too close to each other – this seemed strange, and worth thinking about. Maybe it’s just a case of personal inconsistency; maybe, the sign of something larger, with an objective significance for the entire field.