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Summary

About Distant and Close Reading

It seems that in the humanities, the habit of consistent reading has started to decline immediately after the crisis of the grand narrative. Traditional attentive reading, attributed to “text enjoyment”, which contradicts the understanding of the text itself is only possible... without reading the text. The paper analyzes the content of this paradoxical statement, the system of arguments made by the author of the statement Franco Moretti, the relations between distant reading and the concepts of archive, data, algorithm, textual fact, the application of the Big Data analysis in the humanities, as well as so called digital humanities. The discussion about distant reading and application of the digital technology to text interpretation highlights the connec- tion of these ideas with the visions of a modern reader of the early 20th century, the Russian formalism, finally with the most urgent contemporary question – how to get knowledge from the books you never read?