Objects in Bloom Hegglund, Jon
Prospero (Trieste, Italy),
01/2013
18
Journal Article
Drawing upon Franco Moretti's reading of the early chapters of "Ulysses" as "stream-of-unconsciousness" narration, along with recent insights in object-oriented ontology and thing theory, my essay ...examines the ways in which the characters of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom are created through contrasting methods in the first six chapters of Joyce's novel. Where many critics would point to the animation of objects in "Circe" or the detached, catechistic descriptions of "Ithaca" to discuss the role of nonhuman things in the novel, I look instead to the more "conventionally" modernist chapters, particularly the triad that introduces Leopold Bloom: "Calypso," "Lotos-Eaters," and "Hades." In contrast to a style that organizes narration around Stephen Dedalus' sense perception in the first three chapters, the chapters that introduce Bloom place him, both narratively and syntactically, among a world of nonhuman objects and entities. Through a focus both on Bloom's immersion within objects, and indeed his own object-nature, Joyce advances a new model of character—one that is not an essence but instead a contingent material aggregation of things that must be constantly made anew.
One technique that has proven an effective entry point into quantitative literary study is what the author likes to call character counting. Character counting is when people load a text into ...analytical software and identify the word frequencies for interesting characters. To begin, the main software he uses for this analysis is called Voyant Tools. It's free and it's Web-based. Next, character analysis works best on novels written in the third person. Literary works written from other points of view can make it harder to determine who is speaking or being spoken about. Finally, Voyant Tools will allow you to conduct the majority of the initial analysis and even create a decent graph for you. The visualization he shares here is based on the data and visualization in Voyant Tools, which he then refined in Inkscape, an open-source software alternative to Adobe Illustrator.
Last year, NCTE released a position statement on the growing use of machine-scoring software in assessing student writing (often referred to automated essay scoring or AES). The position statement ...was deftly researched, thoroughly annotated, and clearly written by a task force of educators and researchers. The report argues that the use of software to automatically assess student writing contradicts sound pedagogy, undermining the importance of the writing process. As an alternative, they suggest investing in online portfolio systems rather than AES software. That NCTE took such a rigorous and public stance on the issue is to be applauded. When the authors of the NCTE position statement mention that software has to be "programmed," they refer to a quality of software that merits pause. Software reads the way it does because there are inherent limitations to what software can and cannot do.
Using Chawton House Library's "Novels Online," several corpora have been set up for a computer-aided textual analysis of the use of vocabulary by women writing "domestic novels" from 1752 to 1834. ...This corpus stylistics approach makes it possible to map texts according to their word usage and to identify quantitative keywords which provide vocabulary profiles through comparison and contrast with contemporary male and female canonical texts. Items identified include pronouns, markers of dialogue and of intensity; others can be grouped into specific lexical fields such as feelings. One text from the collection then forms the object of a case-study to explore a paradox: although Jane Taylor's use of vocabulary in her 1817 Rachel appears the most representative of the corpus made up of 42 novels by women, this Chawton text has been called "a highly original tale." Methodology and findings are both presented to address the challenge of identifying features which constitute typicality.
Introduction Cohen, Matt; Hinrichs, Lars
Texas studies in literature and language,
10/2012, Letnik:
54, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Acting on this observation in the analysis of texts is a challenge that digital approaches both answer and augment; our contributors struggle with the technical, interpretive, and political issues ...involved in handling linguistic material from the media of traditional print (the modernist novel, newspapers, and dialect fiction), the multiplayer online role-playing game, and the blockbuster movie.
This article sketches out a possible solution to Franco Moretti's problem of explaining the phenomenon of devices that preclude conscious perception and at once boost sales. By analyzing Moretti's ...example of Conan Doyle's clues as subjectivizing signifiers, and their enthusiastic early reception as a practice of a subjective fidelity to an artistic event, I see a properly scientific stance in Moretti's reluctance to give a proposed scientistic account of this subjectivation. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Supplanting the Sword: Reading the Rise of U.S. Imperial Medicine, 1898-1955 explores how writers of transnational literature have reimagined the terms of U.S. imperial medicine from the turn of the ...twentieth century up through the early Cold War. The project builds on fields of American literary studies, critical race theory, and the medical humanities to examine closely the political imperatives and social contingencies of modern health. Drawing from a diverse cast of writers (Sinclair Lewis, Carlos Bulosan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Toni Morrison), I piece together how the meteoric rise of early twentieth-century medical science became constitutive of and conditional on the rise of U.S. colonialism and neocolonialism: when Spain ceded Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the U.S. after the Spanish-American War (1898), subsequent pushes for hygiene reform and battles against tropical disease helped legitimize America’s growing empire under the banner of humanitarian aid; the nation’s expansionism, in turn, helped provide the requisite territories and populations for the advancement of scientific knowledge. With this conjuncture in mind, I explore public health crossings in Pacific Asia, Central and South America, and the mainland U.S. to connect the active feedback loop that tied health interventions at the imperial periphery to those at its center. Along the way, I call into question long-held assumptions about literature and its place within the medical humanities through various comparative and transnational approaches. Whereas scholars of imperial medicine have tended to view literary fiction as a mere reflection of historical evidence, my study pays careful attention to what the novel form, in particular, can tell us about American medicine’s contentious and contradictory past. I take seriously the capacity for literature to resist the generalizations of positivistic discourses like medical science, and my work brings into sharp relief how imaginative writing can not only formalize struggles against health injustice but envision unauthorized strategies for healing the body and mind otherwise – what I call instances of counter-convalescence. Combined with extensive archival research, this commitment to literary analysis enables me to listen for stories seldom heard in the medical-historical record, pushing beyond more traditional, less narratively focused debates in the medical humanities.
We investigate the use of unsupervised text mining methods for the analysis of prose literature works, using Thomas Pynchon's novel V. as a case study. Our results suggest that such methods may be ...employed to reveal meaningful information regarding the novel’s structure. We report results using a wide variety of clustering algorithms, several distinct distance functions, and different visualization techniques. The application of a simple topic model is also demonstrated. We discuss the meaningfulness of our results along with the limitations of our approach, and we suggest some possible paths for further study.
Insofar as the reading of literary artworks is increasingly limited to literary criticism, any study of reading of such works is a study of critical, that is, close reading. Yet even within ...criticism, close reading has been rejected by distant reading, which enables, precisely by way of this rejection, both the reading of uncanonised texts, neglected by close reading, anda new reading of the canon itself. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Between clandestine meetings with intelligence agents, Maureen Hattrup wrote a series of such delicately composed, diplomatic emails for her colleagues in the office that we hope to publish an edited ...collection of them and organize a book review forum around that collection. Stephanie Koscak, Book Review Editor and Chief Chalkboard Cover Mockup Master, departs for a year full of fellowships and research as she completes both her dissertation on visual representations of the British monarchy and the pilot of a sitcom based on her time in the VS office.
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