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Class 3 Notes

Page history last edited by Alan Liu 3 years, 5 months ago

Preliminary Class Business

 

1. Close Reading and the Information Age?

 

 

"The common goodness which . . . poems share will have to be stated, not in terms of content or subject matter in the usual sense in which we use these terms, but rather in terms of structure.... The structure meant is certainly not form in the conventional sense in which we think of form as a kind of envelope which 'contains' the 'content.'"

--Cleanth Brooks, "The Heresy of Paraphrase," in The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1957) 

 

  • New Criticism's metaphors for "form" or "structure"
  • New Criticism vs. information

    • "As practical people going about our affairs, we ask directions, read road signs, order a dinner from a menu, study football scores or stock market reports.  It is altogether natural, therefore, that we should tend to think the important and central matter in all discourse to be information." (Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, ed.  Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students, 1st ed., 1938, p. 1)

    • "If poetry were just information, we should be dissatisfied, but Wyatt carefully deploys language and metaphor to imply what cannot be stated." (Commentary by Ian Lancashire on Sir Thomas Wyatt's "They Flee From Me")

    • Information overload today (images)

       

  • Thought Experiment: Can you imagine information technology (computers) helping us to "close read" literature?  How?

2. "Distant Reading"

 

"The title of this short book deserves a few words of explanation.  To begin with, this is an essay on literary history: literature, the old territory (more or less), unlike the drift towards other discourses so typical of recent years.  But within that old territory, a new object of study: instead of concrete, individual works, a trio of artificial constructs--graphs, maps, trees--in which the reality of the text undergoes a process of deliberate reduction and abstraction.  'Distant reading,' I have once called this type of approach; where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection.  Shapes, relations, structures.  Forms.  Models."

--Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London; New York: Verso, 2005)

3. Back to Close Reading?

 

 

  • Thought experiment: What if we were still interested primarily in individual works, not in looking at three thousand novels at a time?  What might we take away from Moretti's "distant reading" method that is relevant to reading individual works?

     

4. Intro to Text Analysis and Visualization Tools

 

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