ShouldliterarycriticismbeanartorascienceMoretti(刘琦翻译).docxVIP

Should literary criticism be an art or a science? If youre an English major, what should you study: the unusual group of writers who happen to interest you (art), or literary history and theory (science)? If youre an English professor, how should you spend your time: producing “readings” of the literary works that you care about (art), or looking for the patterns that shape whole literary forms or periods (science)? Almost no one wants to answer the question definitively, because, for a critic, alternating between one’s artistic and scientific nature is fun— its like switching between the ocean and the sun at the beach. 文学评论是视为科学还是视为艺术？如果你是一名英语专业的学生，你要学习什么样的东西？是那些碰巧让你感兴趣的另类作家（艺术）？还是文学历史或理论（科学）？如果你是一名英语教授，你又是如何来支配你的时间的？是写一点文学读物，内容都是你感兴趣的东西（艺术）？还是去寻求一个文学形式或文学时期的发展模式和特点（科学）？对这一问题，可以说是，任何人都不想确切地回答这一问题，为何? 因为对于一个批评家而言，在艺术和科学之间来回穿梭，其乐无穷，宛若时而在大海中游弋，时而在阳光海滩上沐浴，惬意无比。 Franco Moretti, a professor at Stanford, whose essay collection ?Distant Reading just won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, fascinates critics in large part because he does want to answer the question definitively. He thinks that literary criticism ought to be a science. In 2005, m a book called “Graphs，Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, he used computer-generated visualizations to map, among other things, the emergence of new genres(文学类型).In 2010, he founded the Stanford Literary Lab, which is dedicated to analyzing literature with software. The basic idea in Moretti’s work is that, if you really want to understand literature, you cant just read a few books or poems over and over, instead, you have to work with hundreds or even thousands of texts at a time. By turning those books into data, analyzing and comparing those data, you can discovery facts about literature in general. 弗兰克.莫雷蒂是斯坦福大学的一名教授，他的论文集《遥远的阅读》刚刚荣获“国家图书批评家奖”，这引起一大部分批评家的关注，以为莫雷蒂就是一个想确切回答这个问题的人。在他看来，文学评论就应当是一门科学。2005年莫雷蒂写了一本书《图表、地图和树---文学历史的抽象模式》，书中他运用计算机生成可视化的手段将新文学类型进行绘制。2010年，他创建了斯坦福文学实验室，致力于使用计算机软件对文学进行分析。