John Sunyer checks in with Franco Moretti at the Stanford Literary Lab. Moretti, a 63-year-old professor of English, is the author of Distant Reading – a book in which he lays out his long-held belief that “literary study doesn’t require scholars to actually read the books.” Rather, he believes in a “new approach to literature [that] depends on computers to crunch ‘big data,’ or stores of massive amounts of information, to produce new insights.”
“What’d You Major In?” “Big Literary Data.”
Tuesday New Release Day: Harrison; Heidegger; Molina; Hornby; Newlyn
Out this week: Brown Dog by Jim Harrison; a new paperback edition of Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought; In the Night of Time by Antonio Muñoz Molina; a collection of Nick Hornby’s Believer columns; and a new biography of William and Dorothy Wordsworth.
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Nikky Finney on the Poet’s Responsibility
Nikky Finney and Walter Mosley discuss her responsibility as a poet to share her different perspective with the wider world.
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Sonya Chung on the Writing Life
Sonya Chung discusses her recent essay on the film Green Book, as well as how she deals with imposter syndrome as a writer.
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Hawthorne and Melville
“Melville fell in love with the dashingly handsome older author the first time they met, and his forbidden passion drove him to create the symbol of impossible longing that now represents American literature to the rest of the world: the white whale.” On Herman Melville’s love for Nathaniel Hawthorne. Pair with a review of Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun.
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The Literature of Business (Not the Opposite)
Joseph L. Badaracco has been assigning works of literature to his business ethics students at Harvard in order to “help [them] develop literature skills.” The Questions of Character author believes, “literature lets you see leaders and others from the inside. You share the sense of what they’re thinking and feeling.”
Wow. That is incredibly depressing.
During my ill-advised attempt to major in pre-med, I dissected an annelid worm to learn about its anatomy and ended up with a mushy mess. Reminds me of this.
Went to see an absolutely wonderful film “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” recently. There is a scene set in Istanbul. The lead character’s New York investment company has come to evaluate a struggling Turkish publishing company for a possible takeover and asset sale. One of the investment bankers comments that he had “evaluated” several other publishing companies during a meeting with the local publisher. The latter commented (to paraphrase) ‘So you think you can you evaluate me?” There are a million implications in the way the actor delivered that line.