On the Newer Literary-Critical Approach to Biblical Poetry

This presentation discusses the views of three renowned authors – James Kugel, Robert Alter, and Jan Fokkelman – known for their literary-critical approach to the Bible, concerning biblical poetry. According to Kugel, looking at the Bible through the lens of division into poetry and prose (lyrical and epic literature) means looking at it wrongly. He maintains that even meticulous analyses of parallelism can be distorted if viewed through this lens. Therefore, Kugel asserts that there is no poetry in the Bible but rather a “continuum” of loosely connected parallel structures in what we see as prose sections and “heightened rhetoric” in what we often erroneously consider verses. According to Alter, biblical poetry is based on semantic parallelism. However, he points out that poetic expression deliberately avoids complete parallelism, just as language resists mere synonyms by introducing subtle differences between related terms. In contrast, Fokkelman believes that combining prose and poetry, and even transitioning between them, is possible because most Hebrew sentences contain two to eight words and are usually linked in sequences through parataxis (using “… and… and… but… and then”). All three opinions lead to the conclusion that biblical poetry, like prose, is to a large extent sui generis, and that any distinction between poetry and prose, if it exists at all, is not of the same nature as in Western literary culture and it is, therefore, inappropriate to refer to prosimetrum in the Bible

'Immeasurable as One': Vahni Capildeo’s Prose Poetics

The work of the Trinidadian British writer Vahni Capildeo has repeatedly employed prose as a poetic form. Noel-Tod reads two of Capildeo’s major prose sequences – ‘The Monster Scrapbook’ (2003) and ‘Person Animal Figure’ (2005) – in the light of her own critical statements, including her resistance to the expectation that a Caribbean writer living in Britain must be a postcolonial ‘documentary witness’. For Capildeo, prose poetry in the experimental tradition of Baudelaire represents a formal and linguistic continuum through which to explore the continuum of experience: the ‘indivisible’ nature of verse and prose are ‘changes of modality’ in one text, and the multiplicity of identities in her prose poetry present a model of lyric selfhood that expands the definition of both the ‘human’ and the ‘poetic’

LAF-Fabric: a data analysis tool for Linguistic Annotation Framework with an application to the Hebrew Bible

The Linguistic Annotation Framework (LAF) provides a general, extensible stand-off markup system for corpora. This paper discusses LAF-Fabric, a new tool to analyse LAF resources in general with an extension to process the Hebrew Bible in particular. We first walk through the history of the Hebrew Bible as text database in decennium-wide steps. Then we describe how LAF-Fabric may serve as an analysis tool for this corpus. Finally, we describe three analytic projects/workflows that benefit from the new LAF representation: 1) the study of linguistic variation: extract cooccurrence data of common nouns between the books of the Bible (Martijn Naaijer); 2) the study of the grammar of Hebrew poetry in the Psalms: extract clause typology (Gino Kalkman); 3) construction of a parser of classical Hebrew by Data Oriented Parsing: generate tree structures from the database (Andreas van Cranenburgh)

The sonnets of Seamus Heaney in Spanish

This paper seeks to offer a more nuanced and further-reaching exploration of the translation of all of Seamus Heaney’s sonnets into a Spanish ‘collected’, lead by the Mexican poet Pura López-Colomé. Taking in critical thinking on creativity and the ‘post-colonial’ sonnet as well as Heaney’s and López-Colomé’s own views and metaphorics relating to literary translation, this paper asks not only what Sonetos brings to the originals, but what they bring also to poetry and translation. The paper argues that Sonetos offers a distinct insight into questions of semantic faithfulness and the translator’s visibility, but also that whilst we must eschew metaphysical or essentialist language in analysis, the project of Sonetos has also been to communicate not just original poetry’s, but also translation’s qualities as a strategy of (secular) revelation

Complex network analysis of literary and scientific texts

We present results from our quantitative study of statistical and network properties of literary and scientific texts written in two languages: English and Polish. We show that Polish texts are described by the Zipf law with the scaling exponent smaller than the one for the English language. We also show that the scientific texts are typically characterized by the rank-frequency plots with relatively short range of power-law behavior as compared to the literary texts. We then transform the texts into their word-adjacency network representations and find another difference between the languages. For the majority of the literary texts in both languages, the corresponding networks revealed the scale-free structure, while this was not always the case for the scientific texts. However, all the network representations of texts were hierarchical. We do not observe any qualitative and quantitative difference between the languages. However, if we look at other network statistics like the clustering coefficient and the average shortest path length, the English texts occur to possess more clustered structure than do the Polish ones. This result was attributed to differences in grammar of both languages, which was also indicated in the Zipf plots. All the texts, however, show network structure that differs from any of the Watts-Strogatz, the Barabasi-Albert, and the Erdos-Renyi architectures

Guess who? Multilingual approach for the automated generation of author-stylized poetry

This paper addresses the problem of stylized text generation in a multilingual setup. A version of a language model based on a long short-term memory (LSTM) artificial neural network with extended phonetic and semantic embeddings is used for stylized poetry generation. The quality of the resulting poems generated by the network is estimated through bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU), a survey and a new cross-entropy based metric that is suggested for the problems of such type. The experiments show that the proposed model consistently outperforms random sample and vanilla-LSTM baselines, humans also tend to associate machine generated texts with the target author

Is literary language a development of ordinary language?

Contemporary literary linguistics is guided by the 'Development Hypothesis' which says that literary language is formed and regulated by developing only the elements, rules and constraints of ordinary language. Six ways of differentiating literary language from ordinary language are tested against the Development Hypothesis, as are various kinds of superadded constraint including metre, rhyme and alliteration and parallelism. Literary language differs formally, but is unlikely to differ semantically from ordinary language. The article concludes by asking why the Development Hypothesis might hold