A Comparative Analysis Of George Moretti's Theory Of World Literature

On the other hand, through a comparative study by using novel as an example (not a model) and by concentrating on the rise of modern novel, Moretti in his polemical essay attempts to outline how the literary world-system works. Here, as he emphasized in another essay in response to the following one, novels, as a literary genre, are representative of the most mobile strata of the system, not of the entire system, as an example to show the mobility of world literature. In his opinion, the study of world literature needs a collective work where the important facts of literary history be shared. In this way, his proposed method for studying world-system literature is “distant reading”: understanding literature not by studying particular texts,
Besides, Moretti tries to present his own method for studying the Weltliteratur in a scientific way. But, what does studying world literature mean? How do we do
As the time has shown, reading and reading more is not the solution of understanding the mechanism of this literary world. So, we have to put aside “Reading more” as the solution and look for another possible way. Whereas Moretti believes that it is hard to deal with the world and the unread at the same time, he considers it as a great chance which shows enormity of the task and clarifies the fact that world literature cannot be literature, but bigger. In this respect, this world literature, as he says, “has to be different and the categories have to be different,” too. Sticking to the idea that the emergence of a new science depends on following a new problem by a new method, he considers world literature as a problem, rather than an object, requesting for a new critical method. In this regard, as the prerequisite of every theory, he propounds his own hypothesis about the new method for studying world literature through resorting to the concept of international capitalism in the world-system school of economic history as “a system that is simultaneously one, and unequal: with a core, and a periphery (and a semi-periphery) that are bound together in a relationship of