Franco Moretti

Franco Moretti is an Italian literary scholar, trained as a Marxist critic, whose work focuses on the history of the novel as a "planetary form". He has written five books, "Signs Taken for Wonders" (1983), "The Way of the World" (1987), "Modern Epic" (1995), "Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900" (1998), and "Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History" (2005). His recent work is notable for importing, not without controversy [Christopher Pendergast, "Evolution and Literary History: A Response to Franco Moretti," New Left Review 34, July-August 2005"] , quantitative methods from the social sciences into domains that have traditionally belonged to the humanities. To date, his books have been translated into fifteen languages.

Moretti has recently edited a five-volume encyclopedia of the novel, entitled "Il Romanzo" (2004), featuring articles by a wide range of experts on the genre from around the world. It is available in a two-volume English language edition (Princeton UP, 2006).

Moretti earned his doctorate in modern literature from the University of Rome in 1972, graduating summa cum laude. He was professor of comparative literature at Columbia University before being appointed to the Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professorship at Stanford University. There, he founded the Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel. He has given the Carpenter Lectures at the University of Chicago, the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton, and the Beckman Lectures at the University of California-Berkeley. In 2006, he was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also has been a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a frequent contributor to the New Left Review and a scientific adviser to the French Ministry of Research.

He is the brother of Italian filmmaker and Palme d'Or-winner Nanni Moretti.

References

External links

* [http://english.stanford.edu/bio.php?name_id=84 Franco Moretti bio at Stanford University Department of English]
* [http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2006/april26/aaas-042606.html Appointment to American Academy of Arts and Sciences]
* [http://www.amazon.com/dp/1844670260/ Graphs, Maps, Trees]
* [http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8150.html Princeton UP website for Moretti, ed., The Novel]