[5] Over the years, Moretti has been visiting professor at various universities in Europe and North America – including Copenhagen, Toronto, La Sapienza, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris – twice a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1999–2000, 2012–2013), advisor of the French Ministry for Education, and member of the "Digital Humanities Institute" of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland (2016–2019).
[8] The work of this "great iconoclast of literary criticism", as The Guardian once called him,[9] has been translated into 30 languages, and has been the object of two collections of essays – Reading Graphs, Maps, Trees.
[20][21][22][23] Most recently, Moretti's work has been examined in the collection Critica sperimentale, with contributions by Gisèle Sapiro, Patricia McManus, Guido Mazzoni, Francoise Lavocat, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Stefano Ercolino, Jérôme David and others.
Scenes from American Culture, published simultaneously in Italy, the United States and Britain in 2019 – is framed by a long reflection on his first and last university courses, that covers the years from 1979 to 2016;[33] the German edition[34] – Ein fernes Land, Konstanz University Press, 2020 – has been saluted as a "future standard for the field" and "a mandatory reading for all those who are beginning to study the humanities".
[35] During the pandemic of 2020–22, Moretti has continued to give lectures online for audiences in Copenhagen, Berlin, Delhi, Naples, São Paulo and more.
Distant reading has the opposite goal: the scholar should "step back" from an individual text to see a larger picture: for example, the history of a genre during a century or the evolution of a particular artistic device over many decades.
The book examines the great tradition of the novel of youth – Wilhelm Meister, Pride and Prejudice, The Red and the Black, Eugene Onegin, Lost Illusions, Great Expectations, Sentimental Education, Middlemarch ... – considered as the "symbolic form" that allowed nineteenth-century culture to make sense of the political revolutions and economic transformations of western modernity.
Between History and Literature (2013)[41][42] has completed this trilogy of bourgeois existence by tracing its historical keywords ("useful", "comfort", "efficiency", "seriousness", "roba"[clarification needed]...), and following the metamorphoses of "prose" from Defoe to Ibsen and Max Weber.
This, though, was hardly original: Vladimir Nabokov famously taught novelists such as Jane Austen and James Joyce with the aid of location maps.
The Literary Lab continued this direction of work, but this time quantifying literature via the tools of digital text analysis.
Stanford Literary Lab became one of the pioneering groups pursuing computational criticism, and a visible actor in the new field of digital humanities.
In many of his works, Moretti relies on one strand of historical macrosociology – world-systems analysis – and its main theorist, Immanuel Wallerstein.
[51] Applying Darwinian theory to literature is an idea that dates back to the late 19th century (initial attempts were made by Ferdinand Brunetière and Alexander Veselovsky).
Joseph Carroll, Denis Dutton, Jonathan Gottschall, Brian Boyd, Ellen Spolsky, Nancy Easterlin, among others, contributed to the evolutionary literary studies.