Entropic analysis of the role of words in literary texts

Beyond the local constraints imposed by grammar, words concatenated in long sequences carrying a complex message show statistical regularities that may reflect their linguistic role in the message. In this paper, we perform a systematic statistical analysis of the use of words in literary English corpora. We show that there is a quantitative relation between the role of content words in literary English and the Shannon information entropy defined over an appropriate probability distribution. Without assuming any previous knowledge about the syntactic structure of language, we are able to cluster certain groups of words according to their specific role in the text.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

Literary Acoustics

Bringing together sound studies and intermediality theory, this essay revisits the notion of ‘literary acoustics’ to inquire into the usefulness of intermediality studies for analyzing the relations between literature and sound. The second part of the essay is dedicated to an illustrative analysis of Ben Marcus’s highly experimental, noisy book The Age of Wire and String

Dating Victorians: an experimental approach to stylochronometry

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy ofthe University of LutonThe writing style of a number of authors writing in English was empirically investigated for the purpose of detecting stylistic patterns in relation to advancing age. The aim was to identify the type of stylistic markers among lexical, syntactical, phonemic, entropic, character-based, and content ones that would be most able to discriminate between early, middle, and late works of the selected authors, and the best classification or prediction algorithm most suited for this task. Two pilot studies were initially conducted. The first one concentrated on Christina Georgina Rossetti and Edgar Allan Poe from whom personal letters and poetry were selected as the genres of study, along with a limited selection of variables. Results suggested that authors and genre vary inconsistently. The second pilot study was based on Shakespeare's plays using a wider selection of variables to assess their discriminating power in relation to a past study. It was observed that the selected variables were of satisfactory predictive power, hence judged suitable for the task. Subsequently, four experiments were conducted using the variables tested in the second pilot study and personal correspondence and poetry from two additional authors, Edna St Vincent Millay and William Butler Yeats. Stepwise multiple linear regression and regression trees were selected to deal with the first two prediction experiments, and ordinal logistic regression and artificial neural networks for two classification experiments. The first experiment revealed inconsistency in accuracy of prediction and total number of variables in the final models affected by differences in authorship and genre. The second experiment revealed inconsistencies for the same factors in terms of accuracy only. The third experiment showed total number of variables in the model and error in the final model to be affected in various degrees by authorship, genre, different variable types and order in which the variables had been calculated. The last experiment had all measurements affected by the four factors. Examination of whether differences in method within each task play an important part revealed significant influences of method, authorship, and genre for the prediction problems, whereas all factors including method and various interactions dominated in the classification problems. Given the current data and methods used, as well as the results obtained, generalizable conclusions for the wider author population have been avoided

In Limbo, or, The Protracted Death of the Novel: William Gaddis’s J R and the Precarious State of Postmodern Literature

Postponed access: the file will be accessible after 2021-05-15Eksperimentell postmodernistisk litteratur blir framleis møtt med skepsis og skuldingar om irrelevans, også av tonegjevande litteraturkritikarar som Fredric Jameson, som rangerer litteratur under resterande kunstarter i postmoderniteten. Denne masteroppgåva tek for seg dei særeigne kvalitetane til eksperimentell postmodernistisk litteratur med utgangspunkt i romanen J R (1975) av William Gaddis. Denne romanen særmerkast av å være skriven som ein samanhengande dialog, med berre sjeldne innslag av ei narrativ stemme som att på til forsømer den tradisjonelle deskriptive rolla til fordel for å berre være endå ei stemme i samtalemylderet. Dette gjenspeiler Jean-François Lyotards idear om den aukande ugyldigheita til metanarrativ. Med omsyn til dette illustrerer J R korleis romanen, som på det mest konservative presenterast i form av eit strukturert narrativ formidla av ein allvitande forteljar, kan fornyast til auka fleksibilitet for å holde relevans ved lag i postmoderniteten. Ved å presentere teksten så upartisk som mogleg, opnar den seg for ei rekke tolkingar slik at lesaren bidrar til kunstverkets skaparhandling. Lesehandlinga, som i dei mest tradisjonelle tilfella er ei passiv oppleving der forfattaren formidlar eit fullbyrda produkt til lesaren, skiftast her ut med ein dialektisk, aktiv prosess der lesaren og teksta inngår i eit gjensidig forhold. Vidare opnar den ekskluderande autoriteten til ei narrativ stemme for at mindre narrativ i teksten kan nærstuderast, mens større, meir eksplisitte narrativ kan sidestillast, ettersom dialogen ofte består av lange, tilsynelatande trivielle tema. Sjølve oppgåva er delt inn i fire deler. Første del giv ein oversikt over romanens kontekst, postmodernistiske preg og narratologiske særtrekk. Andre del tek for seg entropi, eit dominerande tema i romanen, samt dei ekstralitterære implikasjonane dette inneberer. Tredje del tek for seg dei filmatiske parallellane i romanen. Fjerde del tek for seg den singulære posisjonen til J R i litteraturhistoria; til tross for at Gaddis i aukande grad blir betrakta som ein av dei leiande postmodernistiske forfattarane, har han aldri fått merksemd hos eit større publikum utanom akademiske kretsar i motsetning til forfattarar som Don DeLillo og Thomas Pynchon. Eg vil derfor undersøke arven etter J R, om der er nokon, og parallellane mellom J R og Pynchons hovudverk, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Sjølv om J R tilbyr eit alternativ til den dominerande romanstilen, kan det være at romanen berre er eit unntak til regelen, noko som understrekast av romanens avgrensa lesekrets og den snarare indirekte enn direkte innverknaden til Gaddis.Engelsk mastergradsoppgåveMAHF-LÆFRMAHF-ENGENG35