First of all, thanks to wai chee dimock, the editor of PMLA, and to all contributors for having put this feature together. Devoting time and energy to someone else's work is a very generous thing to do, and I'm grateful to all of you for your attention. Really.

Since Dimock made clear from the start that the discussion would be “on Distant Reading the book,” I will not address Johanna Drucker's and Catherine Nicholson's essays, which, though very interesting, concern methodological and historical issues rather than the book itself. Otherwise, my reply will proceed as follows: a prologue on my relationship to distance; some retrospective thoughts on Distant Reading; a few responses on “facts,” interpretations, “reading,” and “readers”; some reflections on modeling; and a conclusion on what Lisa Marie Rhody calls the “dehumanizing” nature of “scientific discourse.”

At the end of 1922, after years of revolution and civil war, the Soviet Union was formally incorporated, bringing areas of the former Russian Empire into an ostensibly unified conglomerate. Though conflicts continued to smolder, Spenglerian discourse from the area touted a flourishing Slavic East in opposition to a declining European West. For the thousands of Russians and other émigrés from the former Russian Empire living abroad in Europe, this opposition presented a conundrum: should their sympathies lie with their cultural home or with the West, where they experienced daily life?

From Comparative Literature to Cultural Renewal: Georg Brandes's 1872 Introduction to Main Currents of Nineteenth-Century Literature

“The only literature that is alive today is one that provokes debate.” These words ring out in the first published version of a lecture Georg Brandes gave at the University of Copenhagen on 3 November 1871. The lecture was the introduction to a series that changed the course not only of his life but also of Scandinavian and European cultural history. Born in Copenhagen in 1842 to assimilated Jewish parents, Brandes had recently completed a dissertation on French aesthetics and literary criticism and hoped that his lecture series would allow him to replace Carsten Hauch as professor of aesthetics at the university. Brilliant and iconoclastic, the lectures also responded to the Danish defeat in the 1864 war with Prussia, portraying Danish literature and culture as morbidly inward and insular. Brandes urged his countrymen to look abroad, to traditions such as the French, whose literature included many notable writers who grappled with social and political issues, especially those who came of age during the revolutions of 1789 and 1830.