I. The Question of "Method" and Franco Moretti's "Distant Reading"

- Emily Apter claims that comparative literature was global from its inception because it gave Europe
more critical attention than the non-western works.

- The founding figures of comparative literature, Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach, came as exiles to
Istanbul and they shared a common suspicion of nationalism.
I. The Question of “Method” and Franco Moretti’s “Distant Reading”

- Franco Moretti argues that antinationalism is really the only reason behind studying foreign works
- According to him, comparative literature only exists to be an intellectual challenge to national
literatures and local literatures.
- There is a sense of nationalism that ghosts theories and methods:
 English departments - pragmatism
 German studies - reception and discourse theory
 French - deconstruction
 Slavic languages - morphology and dialogism
 Since comparative literature lacks a specific country or a single national identity, it aims
toward finding “a non-nationally defined disciplinary locus”.
 Is it possible to do so? And where can we find such a methodology?
- According to Moretti, literature is a planetary system which raises the issue of how to make credible
comparisons among radically different languages and literatures.
 A need for a new critical method.
 In this regard, Moretti proposes “distant reading” as a solution.
- Close reading is carefully analysing a single piece of work (or a group of works).
- Distant reading is analyzing multiple pieces of literature by using computers that measure sentence
length, structure, and lexicon.
- It is more of a practice than a literary theory
- It aims to shed light on works that have been ignored for so long
- Moretti advocates the dispensing of close reading, and reliance on second hand material.
- He wants to move from a micro to a macro approach in dealing with literature.
- He wants to assign importance again to plot, character, voice and genre as load-bearing units of
global literature.
 According to Apter, distant reading is an ambitious proposition, yet a risky one because it
lacks “an obvious sorting device” and because it may cause the text itself to disappear.
 Apter claims that Moretti left an unsolved problem which is how to have a globalism that
valorizes textual closeness, and simultaneously refuses to sacrifice distance.
 However, she asserts that it has already been tackled by Leo Spitzer.
- She states that Spitzer preached for a universal Eurocentrism and practiced a “staged cacophony of
multilingual encounters”.
 This is the example of a comparatism that sustains at once textual closeness and global reach.
II. From Auerbach, to Said, to Mufti:

Erich Auerbach
- Apter mentions Auerbach’s postscript in Mimesis.
- Auerbach said his book was written in Istanbul “where the libraries are not well equipped for
European studies. He attributes this lack of “a rich and specialized library” to the creation of his
book.
 Can we draw a link between this lack of a rich and specialized library and Moretti’s distant
reading?
Edward Said
- Said supports this and says that “the book owed its very existence to the very fact of Oriental, non-
Occidental exile and homelessness”.
 To what extent are Auerbach’s claims of exile truthful?
Aamir Mufti
- Apter states that Mufti used “the Auerbachian Said as appoint of departure for rethinking
comparative literature in a postcolonial world, by firmly grounding it in the experience of the
minority”.
 Said questioned notions of nation, home, community and belonging while Mufti reflected on
“the reduction of ethnic identity to the faceless category of the minority”.
III. Istanbul and the Atatürk Reforms

- Apter states that “Istanbul played a significant historical role as a magnet for diaspora, migration, and
cultural fusion”.
- The Turkish republic was eager to become westernized by reforming the Academy.
- Ataturk instituted some reforms which highly impacted the politics and culture of Turkey.
- They abolished the Arabic alphabet and abruptly adopted the Romanic alphabet.
 Rendering older educated classes illiterate and ensuring that the next generations became
unable to access the historical archives, legal documents, or the Ottoman literary tradition.
- Auerbach was suspicious of the Turkish government because he claims that it brought emigrants as a
scheme to free itself from imperial hegemony.
- Universities preferred to hire European-educated emigrants as teachers.
 They wanted to learn from Europe to beat Europe. To use its weapons against it.
IV. Spitzer and Auerbach

- Spitzer and Auerbach had overlapping yet distinct paths through the prehistory of comparative
literature.
- They were both engaged with philology (The study of language in oral and written historical
sources), translation and western humanism; however, they had some differences:
 Spitzer adopted a linguistic cosmopolitanism, while Auerbach focused on the poetics of
narrative realism (53).
 This idea of focusing on the poetics of narrative realism is still found to be somewhat
ambiguous.
 Spitzer allowed Turkey to shape his formation of a field of modern humanism, whereas
Auerbach resisted Turkey. He wanted to “maintain exclusive boundaries around European
civilization”.
 Spitzer influenced his students to study East-West exchanges and to be committed to
translation. Auerbach and his students, however, were “uninterested in the potential for an
enlarged vision of world literature presented by the conditions of exile.
 Could Auerbach’s take here be taken as contradictory since his work was characterized by
many to be influenced by the conditions of exile ?
- Auerbach was against expanding nationalism in Turkey and remained suspicious of uniting it with
European culture.
 Apter states that the heavy crossing of Turkish language politics with European philological
humanism is what laid the groundwork for the creation of comparative literature as a global
discipline.
- Auerbach and Spitzer published substantial essays that had a cosmopolitan reach.
 These essays show how European humanism turned German-based philology into a global
discipline, i.e., comparative literature in the postwar USA.
V. Translation
- Victor Klemper drew an analogy between Nazi and Roman linguistic imperialism, and he made the
point that translations, which are made under conditions of conquest, hold a feeling of contempt
toward the original meaning.
- Hugo Friedrich agrees with this claim and asserts that it is a “manifestation of Latin cultural and
linguistic imperialism, which despises the foreign word as something alien but appropriates the
foreign meaning in order to dominate it through the translator’s own language” (57).
 What solution could fix this chauvinistic perspective in translation?
- Spitzer viewed nontranslation (intentionally leaving passages and phrases free-standing in a naked
state of untranslation) as a hollowed principle which he followed in translating texts.
- He intentionally left passages untranslated to preserve the “foreigness” of the original and to make
the readers confront linguistic strangeness.
 In this sense the original text does not surrender to translation. It attempts to make
connections with the target audience even if it may fail or shock.
- Spitzer displayed a sort of love and respect for languages.
- He says that when critics are working with a language, they must love that language unconditionally
(63).
- He himself tried to learn Turkish in his midcareer and placed the Turkish language on an equal
footing with other Romanic languages, as a language worthy of love and as a subject field of
philological research and criticism.
- He also challenged, though not explicitly, the common belief that Indo-European languages are
superior because of their higher incidence of abstraction.
 Spitzer successfully forged a worldly paradigm of translatio studii (the geographical
movement of learning) with strong links to the history of translatio imprii (the movement of
imperial dominance). (64)
 Looking at Spitzer’s work in this article would make one think of him as being a prominent
figure in the history of the comparative literature. However, his impact is largely ignored.
Why is that the case?

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- Emily Apter claims that comparative literature was global from its inception because it gave Europe

more critical attention than the non-western works.

I. The Question of “Method” and Franco Moretti’s “Distant Reading”

 Is it possible to do so? And where can we find such a methodology?

II. From Auerbach, to Said, to Mufti:

III. Istanbul and the Atatürk Reforms

IV. Spitzer and Auerbach

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