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Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders. (ch1)

Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms. London: Verso, 1983.

I bought this book after having devoured Maps Graphs Trees, and so my interest in it has primarily been historical. It's interesting to look at a book almost 25 years older and to see what/how/if it predicts Moretti's later work. Because I think it does, to an extent. Having read MGT, it's a lot easier to see what he was talking about in STW as well as the eventual payoff of this work. That being said, there's not a lot beyond the first chapter that I'm interested in, at least for this context.

Notes

Moretti begins from rhetoric, and specifically from Kenneth Burke, Max Black, and the Annales crew.

"Rhetorical figures, and the larger combinations which organize long narratives, are thus of a piece with the deep, buried, invisible presuppositions of every world view" (6).

"It is no longer a question, then, of contrasting rhetorical (or ideological) 'consent' with aesthetic 'dissent,' but of recognizing that there are different moments in the development of every system of consent, and above all different ways of furthering it" (8).

"Consent" ends up, I think, as Moretti's term for the double-sided identification/division

"Literary texts are historical products organized according to rhetorical criteria. The main problem of a literary criticism that aims to be in all respects a historical discipline is to do justice to both aspects of all its objects: to work out a system of concepts which are both historiographic and rhetorical" (9).

Lukacs as someone who began this way, but ended up opposing history and forms (10-12)

"I have a specific example in mind, which to me seems the most successful attempt to found a 'rhetorical' historiography: Erwin Panofsky's Perspective as a Symbolic Form" (17)

Understands unity of historical and rhetorical study and graps distinction between them.

Falsifiable criticism: "the fundamental area where they should be tested is their analysis of rhetorical mechanisms" --moving away from "sprit of the age" kinds of criticism, which is only ever an aspiration rather than a fact. Plurality of rhetorical forms means that histories become "more comprehensible and more interesting the more one grasps the conflict, or at least the difference, connecting it to the forms around it" (26).

"the substantial function of literature is to secure consent" (27).

(Kant, Schiller, Freud...)

Thoughts

These notes feel a little scattered to me. Here are the two or three main things I take away from this chapter, though:

First, there's a real resonance here with work on genre studies in rhetcomp, and Moretti uses the term occasionally. Genre isn't simply a formal category for him, but one where rhetoric and history combine in the form of particular works. And those two dimensions connect a given work outward to other texts in time (history) and space (rhetoric), placing any given work in a network of other texts.

Second, "consent" is important and emphasizes continuity over breaks. I'll talk more about this when I get to Randall Collins, because he's more thorough in his argument, but to "break" from something is nevertheless to consent to its importance--that's the double-edge of identification/division that Moretti is drawing on, I think.

I may go back and look at Panofsky again in light of this chapter, but not immediately, I think.

There's a resistance on Moretti's part to the figure/ground or text/context divisions that strike me as consonant with Latour in Reassembling the Social. To wit: "an extra-literary phenomenon is never more or less important as a possible 'object' or 'content' of a text, but because of its impact on systems of evaluation and, therewith, on rhetorical strategies" (21).

Also a parallel with Collins in the rejection of literary heroism, zeitgeist, etc. Enough to study literature as the rhetorical and historical signs, without infusing them with "wonder." Wonder being neither extrarhetorical nor extrahistorical.

(ps. It's not hard to imagine that this book didn't exactly fly off the shelves when it was first published, at least in its translation. An argument for the importance of rhetoric and genre in the study of literature/culture? Heh.)