We present in this paper a numerical investigation of literary texts by various well-known English writers, covering the first half of the twentieth century, based upon the results obtained through corpus analysis of the texts. A fractal power law is obtained for the lexical wealth defined as the ratio between the number of different words and the total number of words of a given text. By consi...

Of the many dilemmas facing the assessment of literary competence, one is the extent to which language should constitute part of the target construct intended to be measured. Some argue for the construct-irrelevance of language and hence recommend that it be eliminated or minimized in favor of an exclusive focus on literary competence. In practice, this does not seem to be the case, as language...

Contrary to perceived wisdom, we explore the role of machine translation (MT) in assisting with the translation of literary texts, considering both its limitations and its potential. Our motivations to explore this subject are twofold: (i) the recent research advances in MT, and (ii) the recent emergence of the ebook, which together allow us for the first time to build literature-specific MT sy...

1. The Search for Interdisciplinarity 1.1. The Scientific and Technological Process 1.2. The Resistance of the Literary Field 1.3. An Intermediate Proposal: Interdisciplinarity 2. The Impact of Technology and Literature’s Interdisciplinarity 2.1. Technology at the Service of Literature 2.2. Digital Literature 2.3. Literary Theory about Literature in Hypertext 2.4. A New Paradigm for a New Human...

People have been analyzing discourses, in some sense, for as long as they have been speaking. They have done so without the help of linguists, literary critics, or their theories. But a theoretical framework can still perform a service in making explicit what is normally implicit. In this paper, I will attempt to build a framework for classifying and cataloguing everything that goes on in the p...

Revels in madness will be a useful reference tool for students and scholars, especially for those looking for more obscure figures, like the German Romantic psychiatrists J C Reil, J C A Heinroth, and K W Ideler, whom Thiher describes in detail since few medical libraries have their books. In his introduction, Thiher indicates his distance from Foucault's "brilliant, influential ... but misguid...

“Always historicize!” Fredric Jameson calls this opening salvo from 1981’s The Political Unconscious the book’s “transhistorical imperative” and its “moral” (9). Is this, indeed, the most sacred of all critical commandments? The “thou shalt not kill” of literary studies (above all, perhaps, of American literary studies)? (Nietzsche might have called it, rather, the “thou shalt kill”: in his wor...

Introduction.This paper constitutes part of a series of studies intended to establish "Literature and Art Informatics". The paper describes the conceptual background of multiple correspondence analysis and its use in visualizing conceptual spaces to describe the values that motivate the use of information technology by literary authors. An examination of artistic use of technology builds on pas...

This article discusses the relationship (or lack thereof) between authors’ intentions and the meaning of literary works. It considers the advantages and disadvantages of Extreme and Modest Actual Intentionalism, Conventionalism, and two versions of Hypothetical Intentionalism, and discusses the role that one’s theoretical commitments about the robustness of linguistic conventions and the public...

This essay surveys recent discussion of the problem of form in literary studies, identifies several ways in which the notion of form might be expanded, and suggests ways in which such an expanded category of form might be useful to historians of science and literary critics alike.