The Bestseller as the Black Box of Distant Reading: The Case of Sherlock Holmes
Keywords:
literary history, distant reading, Moretti, Franco, detective fiction, Cartesian subject, Doyle, Arthur ConanAbstract
This article sketches out a possible solution to Franco Moretti’s problem of explaining the phenomenon of devices that preclude conscious perception and at once boost sales. By analyzing Moretti’s example of Conan Doyle’s clues as subjectivizing signifiers, and their enthusiastic early reception as a practice of a subjective fidelity to an artistic event, I see a properly scientific stance in Moretti’s reluctance to give a proposed scientistic account of this subjectivation.References
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