The World Republic of Letters by Pascale Casanova
Published 1999 · 110,000 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The World Republic of Letters to read?
The World Republic of Letters scores 71 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 66 out of 100
- Bourdieusian sociological vocabulary combined with comparative literary analysis.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Abstraction: 75 out of 100
- Sociological theory applied systematically to literary history.
- Information density: 78 out of 100
- Densely argued; every chapter advances the structural account of literary inequality.
- Narrative indirection: 16 out of 100
- Direct argument throughout.
- Symbolic density: 14 out of 100
- Analytical throughout.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- Casanova's irony toward Parisian cultural centrism is implicit but pervasive.
- Resolution withholding: 16 out of 100
- Ends with a clear structural diagnosis, if not a solution.
- Structural complexity: 44 out of 100
- Part-based structure moving from theoretical framework to historical and contemporary cases.
How The World Republic of Letters is regarded
The World Republic of Letters holds a literary regard score of 84 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.