Title of Document: CHAOS AND THE MICROCOSM: LITERARY ECOLOGY IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY Heidi C. M. Scott, Ph.D., 2009 Directed By: Professor Neil Fraistat, Department of English This dissertation investigates literary responses to environmental change in nineteenth-century England. Two tropes, chaos in narrative and the microcosm in lyric poetry, suggest how literary works may have been precurs...

Literary studies and the cognitive sciences, pursuing common interests in language, mental acts, and linguistic artifacts, have developed markedly different approaches to similar phenomena of reading, imaginative involvement, and textual patterning. Until quite recently, the distance between them has drawn more attention than their possible convergence (Franchi and Güzeldere ). A number of ...

The concept of genre is as old as literary theory itself, but centuries of debate haven’t produced much consensus on the topic. Part of the reason is that genre looks like a different thing at different points in the life of a text. Scholars of rhetoric tend to focus on the patterns of communicative action that produce memoranda or tragedies (Devitt 2004; Miller 1984). Sociologists are sometime...

For over 20 years studies in literary theory, linguistics, and semiotics have been contributing with models which describe the role of readers and how they construct the meaning of a literary text. Most of these studies, however, assume an ideal figure who may not necessarily correspond to classroom reality. In this paper I propose a framework which offers a more democratic setting. Cognitively...

The article rescues and analyzes the work done in 1960 by Antonio Gómez Alfaro, the first Spanish author that carried out a study on relations between journalism and literature using a multidiscipline perspective. The tradition documents the emergence of comparative approaches at the end of the 1990s, but the revision of Gómez Alfaro’s proposal is an exceptional advance, because this intellectu...

doing justice to Freud's text, to Schreber's text, and to a few others, less memorable, besides, Chabot baulks at the prospect of writing the history of the real, whether it be of psychoanalysis or of individual texts-all he allows psychoanalysis to aspire to is the narrative history of fiction, in place of the historical reconstruction of (psychic) reality. Reading as a literary critic does, r...

In the rambling sequence of thoughts in Ecl. 10.31-69 that expresses the troubled state of the lovesick Gallus, Vergil depicts his friend as proposing to abandon elegy for bucolic poetry, and to take up a pair of activities presumably related to this change. These activities--carving love-messages on trees and hunting--are to some extent typical of the unrequited literary, especially pastoral, ...

This paper argues that in addition to the familiar approach using formal contexts, there is now a need in arti cial intelligence to study contexts as social constructs. As a successful example of the latter approach, I draw attention to `interpretation' (in the sense of literary theory), viz. the reconstruction of intended meaning of a literary text that takes into account the context in which ...