If Franco Moretti had his way, literature scholars would stop reading books and start counting, graphing and mapping them instead. For an English professor, this is an ambition verging on apostasy. But Mr. Moretti, a professor of English and comparative literature at Stanford and director of the university's center for the study of the novel, insists that such a move could bring new luster to a tired field, one that in some respects, he says, is among "the most backwards disciplines in the academy."