Far Country: Scenes from American Culture

Moretti (Distant Reading;$SPACE$The Bourgeois) is a leading proponent of literary computational analysis whereby large digital collections of literary texts are mined for historical and sociocultural meaning. This methodology is best exemplified by two of the six essays in this latest work. For example, "Walt Whitman or Charles Baudelaire?" examines sentence structure, repetition, modifiers, and the relation of adjectives to their nouns as seen in Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855) and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (1857). Moretti contends that Whitman's free verse reflects the unbounded, industrious, and democratic spirit that hallmarked 19th-century America, while Baudelaire's poetry mirrors the disjunctive, chaotic metropolis that was Paris. And in "Prose and History in Big Two-Hearted River,' " Ernest Hemingway's simple, terse, and repetitive sentence structure epitomizes the soldier-character's inability to give voice to the brutal experience of war. Other pieces include a comparison of space, light, and the idea of legitimate violence in the Western and film noir genres, as well as the use of active and passive subjects in private and public space as demonstrated in the art of Vermeer and Edward Hopper.