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"I am a member of the bourgeois class, feel myself to be such, and have been brought up on its opinions and ideals," wrote Max Weber, in 1895. Who could repeat these words today?
Thus begins Franco Moretti’s study of the bourgeois in modern European literature, where a gallery of individual portraits is entwined around the analysis of specific keywords – such as ‘useful’ and ‘earnest’, ‘efficiency’, ‘influence’, ‘comfort’, ‘roba’ – and of the formal mutations of the medium of prose. The book charts the rise and fall of bourgeois culture, exploring the causes for its historical
weakness, and searches for the seeds of its failures.
Franco Moretti
Franco Moretti is a Professor Emeritus at Stanford, where he founded the Center for the Study of the Novel and the Literary Lab. He writes regularly for New Left Review and is a Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is the author of, among other books, Far Country, The Bourgeois and Graphs, Maps, Trees. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. His book Distant Reading won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
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