Criticism as Experiment

The essay situates Franco Moretti’s work as the catalyst for a polyphonic reassessment of literary theory today. Francesco de Cristofaro and Stefano Ercolino reconstruct a trajectory marked by formal audacity, methodological risk, and a persistent drive to rethink the scope and methods of criticism through bold, falsifiable hypotheses. Bringing together close and distant reading, essayism and quantitative modelling, Marxist traditions and digital humanities, they read Moretti’s criticism as a sustained experiment in combining theoretical abstraction with a taste for the concrete, in which failed simulations and methodological mishaps generate estrangement and new knowledge.