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  1. On paragraphs. Scale, themes, and narrative form
    Published: 01.10.2015

    Different scales, different features. It’s the main difference between the thesis we have presented here, and the one that has so far dominated the study of the paragraph. By defining it as "a sentence writ large", or, symmetrically, as "a short... more

     

    Different scales, different features. It’s the main difference between the thesis we have presented here, and the one that has so far dominated the study of the paragraph. By defining it as "a sentence writ large", or, symmetrically, as "a short discourse", previous research was implicitly asserting the irrelevance of scale: sentence, paragraph, and discourse were all equally involved in the "development of one topic". We have found the exact opposite: 'scale is directly correlated to the differentiation of textual functions'. By this, we don't simply mean that the scale of sentences or paragraphs allows us to "see" style or themes more clearly. This is true, but secondary. Paragraphs allows us to "see" themes, because themes fully "exist" only at the scale of the paragraph. Ours is not just an epistemological claim, but an ontological one: if style and themes and episodes exist in the form they do, it's because writers work at different scales – and do different things according to the level at which they are operating.

     

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    Source: CompaRe
    Language: English
    Media type: Working paper; Working paper
    Format: Online
    DDC Categories: 800
    Collection: Stanford Literary Lab
    Subjects: Digital Humanities; Intertextualität; Roman; Literaturtheorie; Lyrik; Syntax; Absatz <Text>
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    info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

  2. Canon/archive : large-scale dynamics in the literary field

    Of the novelties introduced by digitization in the study of literature, the size of the archive is probably the most dramatic: we used to work on a couple of hundred nineteenth-century novels, and now we can analyze thousands of them, tens of... more

     

    Of the novelties introduced by digitization in the study of literature, the size of the archive is probably the most dramatic: we used to work on a couple of hundred nineteenth-century novels, and now we can analyze thousands of them, tens of thousands, tomorrow hundreds of thousands. It's a moment of euphoria, for quantitative literary history: like having a telescope that makes you see entirely new galaxies. And it's a moment of truth: so, have the digital skies revealed anything that changes our knowledge of literature? This is not a rhetorical question. In the famous 1958 essay in which he hailed "the advent of a quantitative history" that would "break with the traditional form of nineteenth-century history", Fernand Braudel mentioned as its typical materials "demographic progressions, the movement of wages, the variations in interest rates [...] productivity [...] money supply and demand." These were all quantifiable entities, clearly enough; but they were also completely new objects compared to the study of legislation, military campaigns, political cabinets, diplomacy, and so on. It was this double shift that changed the practice of history; not quantification alone. In our case, though, there is no shift in materials: we may end up studying 200,000 novels instead of 200; but, they're all still novels. Where exactly is the novelty?

     

    Export to reference management software
    Content information: free
    Source: CompaRe
    Language: English
    Media type: Working paper; Working paper
    Format: Online
    DDC Categories: 800
    Collection: Stanford Literary Lab
    Subjects: Quantitative Literaturwissenschaft; Digital Humanities; Romantheorie
    Rights:

    publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/home/index/help

    ;

    info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess