American Zombie Gothic by Kyle William Bishop

Moretti acknowledges that the popularity of genres is subject to how “the internal composition of the market changes”.

Moretti notices that genres rise in popularity with some regularity, and then disappear again when they have “outlived its artistic usefulness”.

Franco Moretti understands that literary history is “a collective system, that should be grasped… as a whole” and thus uses graph drawing as a way of developing a “quantitative approach to literature”. It is the project of this discussion to continue and refine the process which Moretti sets out in Graphs, Maps and Trees – Abstract Models for Literary History (2005) where he tries “to imagine what would happen if we… shifted our focus from exceptional texts to ‘the large mass of facts’”, focusing on Moretti’s model of “quantitative history”.

How do we decide which texts “really matter” while others do not? The world literature debate, or world-systems perspective, from which Moretti and others like him are writing places this erasure and canonisation within the context of a competitive (cultural) market, and thus offers a theoretical perspective by which we can evaluate cultural production.įranco Moretti suggests instead performing a “distance reading: where distance… is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes – or genres and systems” (Conjectures 162). I would argue that it is no accident of history or coincidence that these two cultural artefacts, whilst wildly separate in time and space, seem to share a commonality: according to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Monster Culture (Seven Theses) (1996), we can “understand cultures through the monsters they bear”, but why are the monsters so similar when the cultural, geographical and temporal locations are so different? I will demonstrate how analogous points in global economic patterns bear similar cultural production and thus can be better understood by my drawing parallels between them, here in a case study of the Gothic genre.Ĭomparative literary and cultural studies are in a state of crisis: ordering and classifying materials by period, language, region, and so on proves unsatisfying for theorists such as Franco Moretti.įranco Moretti calls the traditional practice of examining texts “close reading” (Conjectures on World Literature (2000) which, whilst still a reasonable enough method of managing literature, it “necessarily depends on an extremely small canon… you invest… in individual texts only if you think that very few of them really matter” (Conjectures 162).

American Zombie Gothic by Kyle William Bishop