#franco moretti

[yorgunherakles]

freud bir şeyleri silerken aynı zamanda koruduğumuzu söylemişti. zihnin kendisi tam bir silme ve tutma sistemi bu yüzden. bu yokluğun bıraktığı ıstırabtan asla kaçış yoktur.

serol teber - davranışlarımızın kökeni

[theblackestofsuns]

The Way Of The World (1987)

Franco Moretti

Verso

[gothicseverance]

Capitalist production (...) forms by deforming, civilizes by barbarising, enriches by impoverishing — a two-sided process in which each affirmation entails a negation.

—Capitalism: A Horror Story

[darkmacademianut]

Franco Moretti (qtd in The Crime Fiction Handbook by Peter Messent)

[grandhotelabyss]

The institution selects for those who love the institution—not those who love the objects of its knowledge or the subjects of its care. If you love the institution, you love what is iterable, formalizable, and manifestly productive for the institution—not the objects of its knowledge or the subjects of its care. You love, in other words, the machine—not the world of objects and subjects the machine’s only excuse for existing was to improve. Because the world isn’t a machine, the mechanistic worldview degrades even the knowledge it was meant to accumulate. Literary studies, fearing it doesn’t belong in the research university, envies the social sciences in the very moment of the latter’s collapse. Why does it collapse? Because there is no human science. As a mere novelist (what a pathetically unscientific thing to be) had his brilliant villainess say, “In history there are no control groups.” The institution, being destroyed in any case by outside forces, is worth mourning insofar as it was for a while some kind of shelter, but it’s really not my problem anymore. Preserving the objects of its knowledge and finding some other way to serve the subjects of its care outside of its crumbling penumbra is my goal now. Further reading: my essay on Franco Moretti’s Far Country: Scenes from American Culture, which explains more clearly what I mean, and concludes:

Thinking to slay monsters, Moretti and his science-envying ideology-critiquing cohort only destroyed everything—art, love, beauty—that stood between the university and the machine. If only he had heeded Walt Whitman, who extols the art of participatory passivity rather than the sciences of cold calculation and brute force. Now the scholar finds himself in the loveless grip not of a harpy, but of the very mechanism he thought would save him from the feminine wiles of great literature.

Read more... 

[this-thing-of-darkness]

The literature of terror is studded with passages where the protagonists brush against the awareness described by Freud that the perturbing element is within them: that it is they themselves that produce the monsters they fear. Their first fear is inevitably that of going mad. [...] The lesson these books wish to impart is that one need not be afraid of going mad; that is, one need not fear one's own repressions, the splitting of one's own psyche. No, one should be afraid of the monster, of something material, something external.

Franco Moretti, The Dialectic of Fear

[riddikulsims]

Some opening gifts moments :)

[miloswanders]

[...] Indeed the followers of pure economic individualism, those who pursue only their own profit, are, without knowing it, the vampire's best allies. Individualism is not the weapon with which Dracula can be beaten. Other things are needed -- in effect, two: money and religion. These are considered as a single whole, which must not be separated: in other words, money at the service of religion and vice versa. The money of Dracula's enemies is money that refuses to become capital, that wants not to obey the profane economic laws of capitalism but to be used to do good. Towards the end of the novel, Mina Harker thinks of her friends' financial commitment: "it made me think of the wonderful power of money! What can it not do when it is properly applied; and what might it do when basely used!" This is the point: money should be used according to justice. Money must not have its end in itself, in its continuous accumulation. It must have, rather, a moral, anti-economic end, to the point where colossal expenditures and losses can be calmly accepted. This idea of money is, for the capitalist, something inadmissible. But it is also the great ideologic lie of Victorian capitalism, a capitalism which is ashamed of itself and which hides factories and stations beneath cumbrous Gothic superstructures; which prolongs and extols aristocratic models of life; which exalts the holiness of the family as the latter begins secretly to break up.

Franco Moretto, The Dialectic of Fear