Distant Reading

“world-systems theory showed the power of core literatures to overdetermine, and in fact distort, the development of most national cultures” (44).

“At bottom [close reading is] a theological exercise—very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously” (48).

“a law of literary evolution: in cultures that belong to the periphery of the literary system (which means: almost all cultures, inside and outside Europe), the modern novel first arises not as an autonomous development but as a compromise between a western formal influence (usually French or English) and local materials” (50).

“when a culture starts moving towards the modern novel, it’s always as a compromise between foreign form and local materials” (52).

“world literature was indeed a system—but a system of variations” (56).

“Forms are the abstract of social relationships: so, formal analysis is in its own modest way an analysis of power” (59).

“Cultural history is made of trees and waves—the wave of agricultural advance supporting the tree of Indo-European languages, which is then swept by a new wave of linguistic and cultural contact . . . And as world culture oscillates between the two mechanisms, its products are inevitably composite ones” (60-61).

“This, then, is the basis for the division of labour between national and world literature: national literature, for people who see trees; world literature, for people who see waves” (61).

Slaughterhouse

“The history of the world is the slaughterhouse of the world” (65).

“The butchers—readers: who read novel A (but not B, C, D, E, F, G, H . . . ) and so keep A ‘alive’ into the next generation [until] . . . A becomes canonized” (67).

“A hit is generated by an information cascade” (69).

BUT “the event that starts the information cascade is unknowable” (70).

“Formal choices that try to ‘eradicate’ their competitors” (71).

“in times of morphological change . . . the individual writer behaves exactly like the genre as a whole: tentatively” (74).

new use: refunctionalization, exaptation (75).

“A device designed to colonize a market niche, forcing other writers to accept it or disappear” (78).

“You learn, so it’s culture, not nature: but it’s a culture which is as unyielding as DNA” (83).

“What the tree says is that literary history could be different from what it is” (88).

“Inevitable was the tree, not the success of this or that branch” (89).

Evolution, World-Systems, Weltliteratur

“divergence pervades the history of life, defining its morphospace as an intrinsically expanding one” (125).

“’A tree can be viewed as a simplified description of a matrix of distances,’ write Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi and Piazza” (125).