“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...

The project Literary Ecology in Nineteenth-Century Bengal has been investigating the representation and interpretation of relationship between humans nonhuman nature context radical transformations physical ideological landscapes that characterized nineteenth-century Bengal. We are examining diverse political, economic scientific influences shaped narrative trajectory literary ecology Bengal, w...

C) Figure 2: The Refine and Abstract operations.

We present an empirical study on the variation of accent type and of context on pragmatic focus interpretation. The material was based on audio-recordings of nine German speakers who were instructed to read dialogues with embedded questionanswer pairs in which the answers constituted the pragmatic focus of the utterance. Different accent types occurred for marking the focus constituent. The aud...

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.