A Different Look At Literature

           Franco Moretti’s article “Graphs, Maps, Trees” takes a look at literature that we are not used to seeing. He takes a very analytical, almost scientific approach to literary history. Some of the advantages of this article are that it lays out a very detailed history of the trends of literature. It uses graphs and figures to give a picture of what Moretti is explaining. Using graphs is helpful in that it gives us a visual image of the decline and rise of novels throughout history. It makes the article easier to understand because there is hard data with specific dates and number of novels per year. This gives a very clear picture of how novels changed in abundance through the years. He also gives graphs of the novel genres as well, adding more information to the history of novels. By giving dates he also compares novel production to events in history, helping us see the correlation between historical events and novels. Such as in Japan when novel production declined during time of political censorship.

            Some drawbacks to this analytical approach to literature is that it is just facts, numbers and dates. Yes, sometimes novels and history went together, but that is not the only thing that was influencing the authors. Sometimes literature tries to oppose the thinking of the time, and bring about social change. Some people can be turned off by all the graphs and figures; they just would rather read words only. Moretti even points out that the amount of literature is too much to study, only certain pieces can be considered, so some generalizations have to be used.

            Another interdisciplinary project could be to study the effects that reading certain types of literature has on the brain. Studies could be done to see how different genres of literature affect the brain. Then studies could be done to compare reading a book to watching a movie and the different changes that happen in the brain during both activities. It would be interesting to see of there would be similar changes during reading as when watching a movie. I think reading would be more activating to the brain because when reading you have to create the images in your mind, and movie watching creates the images for you.

            Another way to approach Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story could be to examine the effects that having only textual conversations with others would affect a person’s psyche. In the book “verbaling” is a rare thing, so to see how not talking actually affects the brain would be a good study to conduct.