This text examines some of the exchanges between translation and literary traditions, specifically the role that translated literature may play in the formation of national or regional literary ...systems. The first part discusses the work of three authors who have identified translation as a force in literary traditions: Itamar Even-Zohar (1939), Franco Moretti (1950), and especially Ricardo Piglia (1940-2017). The second outlines the intellectual trajectories of Roberto Arlt (1900-1942) and Juan Carlos Onetti (1909-1994), demonstrating the extent to which these writers relied on translations in order to have access to literary culture.
This thesis seeks to utilize a distant reading of seventeen essays written by James Baldwin alongside sustained close readings of three topics within those essays in order to understand why Baldwin ...has maintained increased popularity when the original historical context of the essays resulted in fame and critical acclaim, but not major literary awards. The author ran these seventeen essays through topic modeling software, and then engaged with critical and scholarly close readings to establish qualitative and quantitative explanations of patterns that exist in Baldwin’s work. By connecting the findings of work under both the digital humanities as well as African American literary studies, the nature of Baldwin’s essays that ascribes their popularity can clearly be understood.
This dissertation examines the strategies used by early Americans to collect and display data on a variety of natural phenomena. I argue that these data displays allowed Americans to enter debates ...and dialogues about what kind of place the North American continent was and would be. Each chapter focuses on a specific data type (trees, birds, rivers) and considers the scale of place that such data was used to imagine (local, national, imperial). Importantly, the data practices in this dissertation overlapped and competed with one another, illustrating the subjectivity of data. I make this case through a series of close readings and data visualizations.
This article reads Albert Wendt’s theorization and practice of “postcolonial” writing in opposition to the project of constructing a unitary theory of “World SF,” which I argue is a misguided effort ...that, in spite of its good intentions, carries with it some unfortunate colonial baggage. The article focuses on two long narratives by Albert Wendt, the most celebrated and influential Oceanian writer of the past half century. In contrast to understanding Wendt’s work as a “semi-peripheral” success at forging a “structural compromise” between Western and Indigenous forms, I argue for using Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s theory of “globalectics” to describe how Wendt’s “synthesis forged in resistance” articulates Indigenous and Western traditions. To flesh out this theoretical intervention, the article proceeds to a reading of how Black Rainbow and The Adventures of Vela bring the dynamics of identity, recognition, and ignorance to bear upon the legacy and ongoing effects of colonialism.
George Gissing, The Nether World (364) George Gissing's gritty masterpiece of poverty realism The Nether World (1889) continually interrupts its past tense narration to shift into present tense, and ...almost every such scene is a description of spaces- urban spaces, architectural spaces, residential and commercial spaces: the Clerkenwell slum in which his characters are entombed, the Crystal Palace whose imperial amusements taunt and enchant "the slaves of industrialism" (104), Hanover Street "where squalor is kept at arm's length" (65).
Frank claims that a new subgenre of European border novels has emerged. He describes the sociological scenario that has helped generate this literary border zone condition from the outside by ...dividing the European post-World War II era into three, possibly four, distinctive phases, each characterized by a specific politics of the border. He also proposes a series of concepts--border disruption and demarcation, multi, inter, and trans--which can assist in defining the thematic and formal features of this new type of novel, not least in terms of the role of borders.
In contemporary debates about World literature, Franco Moretti’s method of enquiry called “distant reading” has attracted considerable attention. Many have hailed it as a genuine method, and many ...have criticized different aspects of it. This essay tries to provide a close analysis of distant reading, and points out a number of misconceptions in it. Starting by an overview of the current discussions regarding Moretti’s method, the essay makes a detailed scrutiny of some of its practical examples. After illustrating the main problem of his method, i.e. not differentiating between two different kinds of noncanonical literature, few methodological suggestions will be offered to help distant reading avoid the current problematic condition.
The current rise of Machine Learning (ML) and the proliferation of ML-based algorithms in modern technology has led to renewed speculation that Artificial Intelligence (AI) could soon match or exceed ...human cognitive capacity. The ability for an ML-based system to learn, combined with the increasing proficiency and capacity of “deep” ML algorithms lends credence to this speculation, and gives rise to imagined futures—some promising, some apocalyptic—in which machines can think like humans.Many ML algorithms operate on linguistic-based data. Digital assistants such as Siri and Alexa cognize and enact users’ commands, while Google returns extremely relevant datasets based on a few keywords. We increasingly read digital content and information generated by algorithms, such as the generated advertisements that appear in web browsers. ML algorithms are thus becoming increasingly pervasive and effective at reading us and determining what is best to read for us.The sophistication of modern ML algorithms thus calls into question the boundary between algorithmic and human cognition, and the proliferation of ML in modern devices is increasingly forming a technological substrate that reads and writes us into the world at timescales below experiential perception. But as it stands now, even the most sophisticated ML algorithms cannot approach human proficiencies for general reading and writing. And yet, some ML algorithms can perform certain specialized forms of reading and writing remarkably well. At this point, I do not believe either the technical or humanistic communities have developed the necessary critical methodology to formulate when and why these algorithms fail or succeed. And this is a crucial discussion to have both inside and outside of the academy. As ML grows quantitively more sophisticated and proficient, it becomes increasingly important to understand and articulate the qualitative gulf between human and algorithmic cognition. Reading Algorithms will thus attempt to describe a methodology that deploys the algorithms themselves as tools to demarcate the evolving boundary between qualitatively different modes of cognition. In the pages that follow, a humanistic understanding of interpretive reading will be deployed to highlight the qualitative differences in ML-based reading and writing. But crucially, we will also work in the opposite direction, taking a technical understanding of how ML algorithms consume and cognize textual data as an alternate “language” in which to formulate abstract literary-critical concepts.
Surely, Zadie Smith aimed for more than a simulacrum of the generic features that characterized Gravity’s Rainbow when she wrote her own novel, White Teeth. ...because there are no chapters that ...offer specific readings of Ercolino’s chosen novels, there is perhaps a danger that this study offers ammunition to conservative opponents of maximalist (i.e. experimental, exuberant) novels. Could they not claim, based on The Maximalist Novel, that the novels of Pynchon and Wallace are simply a conglomeration of generic features, cobbled together with ingenuity bereft of feeling, and find their way into university courses because of the theoretical apparatus literary critics use to justify their gnomic claims about seemingly unreadable books? I do not sympathize with this view but one can see how a reader – frustrated with one of the novels Ercolino chooses to assess – might distort his methodology in this manner. What I would like him to do is ally his clear gifts as a practitioner of literary theory to his instincts as a reader, thereby bringing questions like quality, style, characterization and meaning back to the centre of an essentially fascinating question: why have so many interesting novelists chosen to write books in the mode of Pynchon, Wallace, DeLillo, Smith, Franzen, Bolaño, and the Babette Factory since the end of WWII?
The last decade or so, however, has found many critics seeking the revival of form as a key axis for literary study as against a perceived overemphasis on (or reduction to) historical context or ...ideological content. ...other critics urge "distant reading": methods like Franco Moretti's turn to graphs, maps, trees, and (more recently) network theory; or Heather Love's Latour-inspired "descriptive turn."
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