American Scientist

Literary history would hardly seem to have much in common with structural engineering. Still, a recent development in the study of literature has revealed temporal patterns in the rise and fall of literary genres surprisingly similar to those related to the success and failure of large bridge types. For some years now, the literary scholar Franco Moretti has been applying quantitative methods to the study of the novel. In the recently published first in a series of three projected articles, he has proposed that the genre has had not a single rise but rather that different forms of it have developed, evolved and disappeared in a repeating manner. In fact, according to Moretti, different novel types—picaresque, gothic, domestic et cetera—appear to have experienced roughly 30-year periods of rising and falling popularity, indicating that there are forces at work that transcend any given literary movement or fashion. Such forces also appear to be at work in structural engineering, where cycles of a similar duration and patterns of success and failure apply across a wide variety of bridge types.