1. Though comic books and graphic novels are earning more serious academic consideration than ever, in relation to one of the foremost goals of twentieth century art and literature, comic books may be more important and innovative than even the most open-minded of scholars have yet to realize. Comics, graphic novels, and sequential art belong to a rich artistic and literary tradition due in no ...

This thesisapplies the Data-Oriented Parsing framework in two areas:parsing & literature. The data-oriented approach rests on the assumptionthat re-use of chunks of training data can be detected and exploited attest time. Syntactic tree fragments form the common thread in the thesis.Chapter 2 presents a method to efficiently extract them from treebanks,based on heuristic...

This article places the Kenyan intellectual Ngũ gũ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow (2006) in what has until now been seen as a predominantly Latin American tradition of dictator novels. Dictator novels unmask the intrinsic fallibility of power. The purported omnipotence of the dictator is undermined by dictation: that is, by his power’s reliance on the shifty and ambiguous medium of language, ...

Stylometric analysis of prose is typically limited to classification tasks such as authorship attribution. Since the models used are typically black boxes, they give little insight into the stylistic differences they detect. In this paper, we characterize two prose genres syntactically: chick lit (humorous novels on the challenges of being a modern-day urban female) and high literature. First, ...

This study focuses on Arashi ha Mujyō Monogatari (“The Tale of Transient Popular Kabuki Actor Arashi’s Life”; 1688), a novel from the early modern Japanese literature, written by Saikaku Ihara (1642–93). It is a first work of a Kabuki actor’s life in Japan (Kabuki is a traditional stage arts performed exclusively by male actors with the accompaniment of live music and songs). Then we will exami...