Creating the European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC): Challenges and Perspectives

The aim of this contribution is to reflect on the process of building the multilingual European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC) that is being created in the framework of the networking project Distant Reading for European Literary History funded by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). To provide some background, we briefly introduce the basic idea of ELTeC with a focus on the overall goals and intended usage scenarios. We then describe the collection composition principles that we have derived from the usage scenarios. In our discussion of the corpus-building process, we focus on collections of novels from four different literary traditions as components of ELTeC: French, Portuguese, Romanian, and Slovenian, selected from the more than twenty collections that are currently in preparation. For each collection, we describe some of the challenges we have encountered and the solutions developed while building ELTeC. In each case, the literary tradition, the history of the language, the current state of digitization of cultural heritage, the resources available locally, and the scholars’ training level with regard to digitization and corpus building have been vastly different. How can we, in this context, hope to build comparable collections of novels that can usefully be integrated into a multilingual resource such as ELTeC and used in Distant Reading research? Based on our individual and collective experience with contributing to ELTeC, we end this contribution with some lessons learned regarding collaborative, multilingual corpus building

Fictions and Facts on the Mysticism of Land-Labor around World War I: the peasants'economy in the Romanian literature (a case study: Ion Agârbiceanu's rural prose)

A “quasi-mystical” understanding of our rural economy (which has always favored propagandist uses) is disseminated through a great number of literary works and political texts, which, before World War I, depict the Romanian village as a place of poverty, misery, abuse and crime. The peasants’ habits of labor and leisure get through to the readers as an architecture of infernal circles, while “rural” psychologies are the epitome of unconscious pulsations, of extreme,self-consuming and undetermined passions. In a nutshell, this literature enhances the view that the Romanian peasant can never be reasonable. A bulk of passions and a brutal body (so, a perfect subject of physical and spiritual toils), this type of man is quite unable to cooperate, to rationalize his labor efforts, thus to integrate his household economy within a higher and more complex economical mechanism, as the doctrinarians of the National Peasants’ Party claim. Invariably, we are introduced to an incessant and wearisome process of labor, whose aims – highly predetermined by an Orthodox mindset – are not to be found or expressed here on Earth, but in the afterlife. Yet, in the context of war dynamics, which brings about demographic mobility, technical input and mentality changes, the Romanian rural economy is substantially changed by the new distribution of land ownership. Observing pernicious phenomena such as property fragmentation and overcrowding of rural areas, economist Virgil Madgearu warns about issues such as labor efficiency and intensive exploitation of agricultural fields. Extremely sensitive to the labor’s ethic (which organizes both his biography and his characters’ fictional biographies) and to the small household’s economy, Ion Agârbiceanu is a writer who records, in a behaviorist fashion, the changes occurring in Transylvanian rural society after the great Union of 1918. His literature is extremely valuable for the way it catches the traits of Romania’s rural areas, especially in Transylvanian villages that are now permeated not only by new habits developed after the war (leisure activities, new types of speculations), but also by a way of conceiving and practicing politics that is coming from the new capital, Bucharest. As Ion Agârbiceanu attests, peasants have to understand not only the social function of land but also the importance of the new owners’ mentality in an emerging rural market

Hajduks Library_PopescuND_MiulHaiducul

Dataset for Research on the Romanian Popular Novel

CityMysteries Library_BolintineanuD_DoritoriiNebuni

Dataset for Research on the Romanian Popular Novels (City mysteries

Hajduks Library_Anonymous_RoscanHaiducul

Dataset for Research on the Romanian Popular Novel

Viitorul nostalgiei: de la limbaj literar la limbaj vizual

Distincția dintre “discurs nostalgic” și “nostalgie”, precum și recentele uzaje teoretice ale conceptului de “nostalgie” în varii câmpuri ale umanioarelor interdisciplinare m-au condus spre reevaluarea istoriei termenului. Am în vedere în special momentul când Jean Starobinski desprinde “nostalgia” de “melancolie”, considerând că nostalgia reprezintă o pedanterie terminologică și neologistică, menită să se stingă atunci când vor dispărea diferențele dintre sat și oraș. Recenta reevaluare a conceptului pe care o realizează criticul genevez în 2012 poate fi așezată în trena câtorva studii consacrate potențialului social al nostalgiei și instituirii unui sens mai curând temporal decât spațial (Fred Davies, Svetlana Boym). Dar ea oferă și oportunitatea unei mai bune focalizări asupra simptomatologiei acestor 2 boli considerate a fi codependente. În vreme ce melancolia se manifestă ca un blocaj al umorilor (o blocare în trup), nostalgia este adeseori reprezentată ca o inflamație a creierului. Cele 2 concepte se articulează pe 2 fonduri perceptive diferite: melancolia atinge auzul, în timp ce nostalgia atinge văzul. Făcând apel la 2 filme regizate de Andrei Tarkovski (Nostalgia) și Lars von Trier (Melancholia), am încercat să observ cum se modifică uzajul celor două concepte atunci când trec de la semiotica literară la semiotica cinematică. De asemenea, am dorit să evaluez dacă fondul esențial vizual al nostalgiei este responsabil pentru rezistența și mutabilitatea sa teoretică

CityMysteries Library_RadulescuNiger_RomanulCasniciei

Dataset for Research on the Romanian Popular Novels (City mysteries

Hajduks Library_PopescuND_AgaGruiaGrozoveanu

Dataset for Research on the Romanian Popular Novel

CityMysteries Library_Aricescu CD_MystereleCasatoriei2

Dataset for Research on the Romanian Popular Novels (City mysteries