In a world where complex networks are an increasingly important part of science, it is interesting to question how the new reading of social realities they provide applies to our cultural background and in particular, popular culture. Are authors of successful novels able to reproduce social networks faithful to the ones found in reality? Is there any common trend connecting an author's oeuvre,...

The stark contrasts between romance novels and pornography, both multibillion dollar global industries, underscore how different male and female erotic fantasies actually are. These differences reflect the different selection pressures males and females faced over human evolutionary history and highlight the utility of using unobtrusive measures to study aspects of human nature. Salmon & Symons...

Ollivier Dyens presents in his article, "Cyberpunk, Technoculture, and the PostBiological Self," the argument that because of technology's intrusion in our perception and understanding of the world and because of its constant production of impossible images of the human body, today's representation of that same body must be fundamentally re-evaluated. As one can see in works of science fiction ...

Genre analysis can be viewed from two different perspectives: it may be seen as a reflection of the complex realities of the world of institutionalised communication, or it may be seen as a pedagogically effective and convenient tool for the design of language teaching programmes, often situated within simulated contexts of classroom activities. This paper makes an attempt to understand and res...

Stephan Schaffrath, in his paper "The Methodology of Architectonic Truth-Finding in Grass's The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel)," discusses how Günter Grass's The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) negotiates the treacherous terrains that lie between positivism and nihilistic relativism by means of a truth-finding methodology. Schaffrath proposes that truth-finding methodology applies approximative, and t...

Network Text Analysis (NTA) involves the creation of networks of words and/or concepts from linguistic data. Its key insight is that the position of words and concepts in a text network provides vital clues to the central and underlying themes of the text as a whole. Recent research has relied on inductive approaches to identify these themes. In this study we demonstrate a deductive approach th...

Literary genres are commonly viewed as being defined in terms of content and style. In this paper, we focus on one particular type of content feature, namely lexical expressions of emotion, and investigate the hypothesis that emotion-related information correlates with particular genres. Using genre classification as a testbed, we compare a model that computes lexiconbased emotion scores global...

This paper considers an evolving project about climate change that will explore using collaborative creative writing strategies to emotionally support and engage writers, primarily focusing on how narratives of hope optimism might counter affective responses anxiety, the resultant solipsistic inertia or surrender. We ask: what role could fiction play in helping create positive futures strengthe...

Literature and Medicine 20, no. 1 (Spring 2001) 13–25 © 2001 by Eric S. Rabkin *The Genre Evolution Project (GEP) web site (http://www.umich.edu/~genreevo) includes a Team Roster that lists the names of all faculty and students involved in this work from its inception. I particularly want to thank my friend and collaborator Carl P. Simon, Professor of Mathematics, Economics, Public Policy, and ...

Although gender differences are known to exist in the publishing industry and in reader preferences, there is little public systematic evidence about them. This article uses evidence from the book-based social website Goodreads to provide a large scale analysis of 50 major English book genres based on author genders. The results show gender differences in authorship in almost all categories and...