World Literature, traditionally known as Comparative Literature, draws together literatures and cultures of a wide variety of countries and regions. Western and non-Western literary traditions are included in the curriculum, which emphasizes overall the junction – and not division of the past and present, ancient and modern. Ancient Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome – the roots of Classical Traditio...

Paradox is one of the literary techniques in the poetry of the Safavid poets. Hazin-e Lahiji, like so many other poets of that age, employed this technique in his pursuit and showed that "unfamiliar meaning". Paradox is used in the poetry of Hazin-e Lahiji for the purpose of defamiliarization and exoticism. The poet in order to create new implications and subtle and insightful points and also t...

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, crime fiction is a topranking literary genre, and has become part of mainstream culture. The crime novel’s position of pre-eminence derives from its broad fan base and its readership, with publishing houses devoting whole series and large print runs to the genre. Evidence of the prevalence of a popular obsession with crime stories is also to be foun...

Many existing approaches for measuring text complexity tend to overestimate the complexity levels of informational texts while simultaneously underestimating the complexity levels of literary texts. We present a two-stage estimation technique that successfully addresses this problem. At Stage 1, each text is classified into one or another of three possible genres: informational, literary or mix...

Conversations for Cooperation refer to the perspectives on design of cooperative systems which rely on the today prevalent conversational analogy— i.e., viewing communication with and through computers as a conversation. Among those perspectives are the ones based on the “models of language use” of Clark and his colleagues. From my experience of Clark and colleagues’ models of the referring pro...

This article seeks to contribute to contemporary discussions on the workings of culturalmemory and examines in particular theway inwhich literary texts can function as a social framework for memory.Through a detailed study of the genesis, composition, and long-term reception of Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1982 [1818]), I argue that literary texts play a variety of roles in the forma...

This paper examines the use of leprosy as a literary motif in poetry, narrative literature, and homilies from England and Scotland between the 1200s and 1500s, the time period during which a shift in leprosy’s literary connotations is visible. It tracks the changes in leprosy’s meaning, as it moves from a disease signifying holy suffering and nearness to God to a physical representation of a di...

There is growing recognition among educators of the need for establishing practical pedagogical approaches that facilitate the development of literary understanding. "Literary understanding" is that form of thinking which is characteristically divergent and inward, focused on "personal meanings, understandings of human situations and the complex web of relationships embedded in them" (Langer, i...

This paper proposes a graph based methodology for automatically disambiguating authors’ mentions in a corpus of French literary criticism. Candidate referents are identified and evaluated using a graph based named entity linking algorithm, which exploits a knowledge-base built out of two different resources (DBpedia and the BnF linked data). The algorithm expands previous ones applied for word ...

We present a generative model for conversational dialogues, namely the actortopic model (ACTM), that extend the author-topic model (Rosen-Zvi, et.al, 2004) to identify actors of given conversation in literary narratives. Thus ACTM assigns each instance of quoted speech to an appropriate character. We model dialogues in a literary text, which take place between two or more actors conversing on d...