World literature theory fits macro-trends but cannot capture each text’s distinct form

Evidence

However, precisely because of its comparative and synoptic tendencies, world literature as it has evolved in recent years seems best suited to describe trends in the production, consumption, and circulation of literature and its development across space and over time rather than to deal with those formal aesthetic and narrative choices that give each text its distinctive character and meaning but that always emerge from the contentious moments in which they are shaped. For example, Franco Moretti’s sociology of generic adaptation—a hybrid of structuralism and world-systems theory that sees literary development as a struggle for symbolic hegemony across the world—does away with the need for close reading altogether, advocating instead what he calls “distant reading”: “The trouble with close reading … is that it necessarily depends on an extremely small canon.… [Y]ou invest so much in individual texts only if you think that very few of them really matter.… Distant reading … is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 54

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Moretti’s ‘distant reading’ as the methodological rival to the close reading this book defends.
• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s hinge task: distant reading vs. close reading is the methodological fork that determines whether Hamid and Naqvi can function as evidence for contesting Islamophobia. — connects to: Local oral literatures resist absorption into any unified Third World Literature category — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 318; Structural linguistic asymmetry makes the third-world text unknowable to metropolitan theorists — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 376; Aggregating language literatures into an ‘Indian’ object requires new non-comparatist theoretical principles — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1150