Franco Moretti Map

Franco Moretti’s writing on map allows us to understand literary works in terms of visual aspect, and this seems to make us to rethink about the narrative and structure of the literary works in a different way. He explains that the structure of Mary Mitford’s Our Village shows circular pattern of the narrative by making connections between components of the work and geographic places. Moretti asserts that this visualization can be possible only through examining the components of literary works through mapping and the ‘mentalite’ of literature can be found from the examination of activities in the literary work. For this reason, he says that the ideology of literature can be found in the map of the works. He also explains that reducing text into a map does not just mean that it makes the text as a part of the map. Rather, by doing this, he says that we can find some relations within components and this can extend the concept of geography to geometry. He gives an example of Atlas of European Novel and examines how the characters in the novel are situated in different places and how the relationship can be found from this geographic analysis and he says that this relation can be analyzed in a geometric way. He also adds that such literary interpretation of using map not only shows us meaning extensively, but also the intrinsic characteristic of the components. His analysis of literature in terms of geographic analysis seems convincing as it deals with the structure of literature in a more dynamic and refreshing way. If we read literature only with close reading, we would not be able to conceptualize such way of examining plot structure. Because of that, such way of reading would be necessary for future studies.