Looking from a distance, as a condition of knowledge, participates within a long-standing Western tradition of power relations. This article considers the use of "distant reading" as theorized by Franco Moretti in his book by the same title and suggests that the method of literary analysis that uses such a metaphor should be aware and critical of that tradition. Moreover, this article suggests that we look to examples in literature, such as ekphrastic poetry by women for possible alternative approaches to reading at a distance as an approach to large corpora of text. Essentially, a feminist approach to distant reading is possible and necessary, and this paper calls for making such work more central to our discussions of distant reading by literary scholars
