Abstract: Franco Moretti is one of the most controversial scholars of world literature today. Compared with others', his world literature is not of "substantive existence", but of "conceptual existence". From the perspective of conception, Moretti regards world literature as a holistic thinking mode of dealing with the evolution of literature in the era of globalization, and it is also the problem itself that needs new critical methods to solve. As a solution to the problems of world literature by Moretti, "distant reading" symbolizes the paradigm revolution of reading objects, reading subjects and reading methods with its "second-hand reading", large-scaled reading, collaborative reading and computational criticism, thus contributing to the digital humanistic transformation of literary criticism. From world literature, distant reading to digital humanities, Moretti not only demonstrates a clear theoretical evolutionary logic and ideal, but also builds a new literary theory and critical system.

Key words: Franco Moretti, world literature, distant reading, digital humanities