Profiling a set of personality traits of text author: what our words reveal about us

Authorship profiling, i.e. revealing information about an unknown author by analyzing their text, is a task of growing importance. One of the most urgent problems of authorship profiling (AP) is selecting text parameters which may correlate to an author’s personality. Most researchers’ selection of these is not underpinned by any theory. This article proposes an approach to AP which applies neuroscience data. The aim of the study is to assess the probability of self-destructive behaviour of an individual via formal parameters of their texts. Here we have used the “Personality Corpus”, which consists of Russian-language texts. A set of correlations between scores on the Freiburg Personality Inventory scales that are known to be indicative of self-destructive behaviour (“Spontaneous Aggressiveness”, “Depressiveness”, “Emotional Lability”, and “Composedness”) and text variables (average sentence length, lexical diversity etc.) has been calculated. Further, a mathematical model which predicts the probability of self-destructive behaviour has been obtained

Ruin, allegory, melancholy. On the critical aesthetics of W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn

While ruins have been a popular object for nostalgic yearnings of a better past, they also harbour an ambivalent potential for moral and historical critique. This article unpacks the variety of meanings ruins embody in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. I do so in three steps. First, I demonstrate how his sensory appreciation of buildings and objects is closely entwined with two moral-historical critiques that were formulated most poignantly by authors of the Frankfurt School: the dialectics of progress and regress, and the remembrance of the repressed. Second, I describe in more detail the style figures through which Sebald puts these critical aesthetics to practice: Walter Benjamin’s notions of the storyteller and allegory. Third, I critically reflect upon the melancholy effect these critiques and style figures produce, and the possibilities they provide for both dialogical critique and contemplative resignation

Role model (in) advertising?

The article concentrates on analysing the growing interest of academics in studying advertisements. While arguing why this perspective of reading literature may bring interesting critical results, the article focuses mainly on the character of Anna Csillag and its evolution through the twentieth century. Originally Anna Csillag was created as an advertising strategy to be used in selling hairgrowth cream. Boasting beautiful hair, the character grew in popularity across Europe, turning into a public icon of the first half of the twentieth century. Anna Csillag appears as a fictional character in Bruno Schultz’s story Księga (The Book). The article also traces other references to this figure in the twentieth and twenty-first century literary and artistic works

Themes of Self-Laceration Towards a Modicum of Control in Nineteenth Century Russia as Expressed by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov

The majority of the academic discourse surrounding Dostoevsky and his epic, The Brothers Karamazov, has been directed toward the philosophic and religious implications of his characters. Largely overlooked, however, is the theme of laceration. In the greater scope of laceration stands the topic of self-laceration. Self-laceration refers to the practice of causing harm to the self in a premeditated and specifically emotionally destructive fashion. The cause of this experience is varied and expressed in as many ways as there are individuals. The struggle in the Russian psyche between viewing the world as fatalistic or as more of an existential experience finds resolution through self-laceration. By consciously choosing actions that will lead to an abject state, the characters take fate into their own hands. This thesis will explore the themes of self-laceration in a number of characters’ narratives and demonstrate that by utilizing emotional self-destruction they find a modicum of control