This paper examines the use of the anecdote in critical scholarship as an ethical approach to studying Aboriginal literature. As many scholars are now becoming aware of the damage that has been done to texts by critiquing Aboriginal literature from the position of cultural outsiders, this paper suggests that anecdotal theory proposed by Jane Gallop is an ethical approach to Aboriginal literature. The use of story to generate theory explored by Aboriginal scholars of literature is compared to anecdotal theory, which implies that the use of anecdotes is an ethical approach suggested by Aboriginal culture. Anecdotal theory, the practice of recording a personal anecdote and then reading it to generate theory, offers non-Aboriginal scholars as well as Aboriginal scholars a way to connect to the text. Using anecdotal theory helps scholars remain more responsible to the texts they are critiquing; anecdotes make scholars more self-aware and ground them in real experience, due to the anecdotes embodied nature and use of humour. This paper focuses on Aboriginal texts and scholars from North America. Helen Hoys critical work How Should I Read These: Native Women Writers in Canada is analysed for her use of the personal anecdote to examine its effectiveness. While Jane Gallop coins the term anecdotal theory, this paper attempts to connect personal anecdote, scholar, and literature in a way that Gallop does not.

This paper examines the use of the anecdote in critical scholarship as an ethical approach to studying Aboriginal literature. As many scholars are now becoming aware of the damage that has been done to texts by critiquing Aboriginal literature from the position of cultural outsiders, this paper suggests that anecdotal theory proposed by Jane Gallop is an ethical approach to Aboriginal literature. The use of story to generate theory explored by Aboriginal scholars of literature is compared to anecdotal theory, which implies that the use of anecdotes is an ethical approach suggested by Aboriginal culture. Anecdotal theory, the practice of recording a personal anecdote and then reading it to generate theory, offers non-Aboriginal scholars as well as Aboriginal scholars a way to connect to the text. Using anecdotal theory helps scholars remain more responsible to the texts they are critiquing; anecdotes make scholars more self-aware and ground them in real experience, due to the anecdotes embodied nature and use of humour. This paper focuses on Aboriginal texts and scholars from North America. Helen Hoys critical work How Should I Read These: Native Women Writers in Canada is analysed for her use of the personal anecdote to examine its effectiveness. While Jane Gallop coins the term anecdotal theory, this paper attempts to connect personal anecdote, scholar, and literature in a way that Gallop does not.

Esta dissertação propõe uma leitura dos contos que compõem a última fase da produção artística de Luigi Pirandello, acompanhada da tradução daqueles que consideramos mais relevantes no contexto de nosso estudo, alguns inéditos em língua portuguesa. Abordamos essas narrativas a partir do tratamento dado às tensões e contradições da subjetividade, que aqui tende à desintegração ou à dissipação na Natureza, e sua pertinência no contexto das estéticas modernas, tanto sob o prisma formal como temático. O trabalho está estruturado em quatro capítulos, versando sobre o tema geral a partir de obras distintas: C?è Qualcuno che Ride, Soffio, Un?Idea, La Casa della Agonia, além do romance Uno, Nessuno e Centomila, privilegiado enquanto ponto de convergência dos principais temas e procedimentos do escritor siciliano. Procuramos mostrar como o desejo utópico de regressão a um estado primitivo de consciência, que permeia esses textos como principal elemento de tensão, tende a escancarar definitivamente a realidade da falência das relações sociais, tema que o autor perseguiu por toda a sua obra. / This dissertation purposes an interpretation of the short stories that constitute the last stage of Luigi Pirandello?s artistic production, followed by the translation of the most important narratives inside the context of this work, some of them unpublished in Portuguese. Our approach is based on the treatment given to the tensions and contradictions of the subjectivity, that here tends to desintegration or waste in the Nature, and its relevancy for the modern aesthetics, both under formal and thematic prisms. The essay is formed by four chapters, discussing the general subject from different works: C?è Qualcuno che Ride, Soffio, Un?Idea and La Casa dell?Agonia, beside the novel Uno, Nessuno e Centomila, privileged as convergence point of the Sicilian writer?s main themes and procedures. We attempt to show how the utopic will of regression to a conciousness primitive condition, that permeates these texts as main tension component, tends to definitely confirm the reality of the social relationships loss, subject chased by the author all over his work.

This dissertation focuses on the intersections of theories of place, space, and story. It is part ethnographic, part literary studies, and dives deeply into American history and literature, beginning with the industrial revolution in the 19th Century. It steps into theories and literature surrounding how we story ourselves into the world, focused in large part on the literary archetype that grows from the concept of the flâneur--Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin's urban wanderer who walks both the city streets and art and literature to explore meaning and purpose of city and story, and to fight against a sometimes alienating place. My dissertation expands some of those notions, and explores the ways we expand and investigate our own literary geographies. Each chapter merges theory and practice in various ways of reading and writing space and story--from a walk across the city and its waterfront where I chronicle the history of the flâneur alongside the history of the economic and physical development of New York City; to a sit in a neighborhood café where I theorize how we layer (or "write") history, personal experience, and literature into familiar places; to a 24-hour ride along the 1-line subway, which becomes an extended metaphor that problematizes "meaning" in literature as I loop through a supposedly static space, barely moving from my seat from 8am to 8am. Each of these investigations intentionally blurs the lines between reading and writing, space and story, and theory and practice, in order to expand theoretical approaches to place and literature. Through this dissertation I hope to add to the theoretical body of work in studies of place, literature, and urban studies, and to challenge the ways that we discuss literary theory by offering approaches to these discussions in ways that situate them in a different sort of action.

Esta dissertação propõe uma leitura dos contos que compõem a última fase da produção artística de Luigi Pirandello, acompanhada da tradução daqueles que consideramos mais relevantes no contexto de nosso estudo, alguns inéditos em língua portuguesa. Abordamos essas narrativas a partir do tratamento dado às tensões e contradições da subjetividade, que aqui tende à desintegração ou à dissipação na Natureza, e sua pertinência no contexto das estéticas modernas, tanto sob o prisma formal como temático. O trabalho está estruturado em quatro capítulos, versando sobre o tema geral a partir de obras distintas: C?è Qualcuno che Ride, Soffio, Un?Idea, La Casa della Agonia, além do romance Uno, Nessuno e Centomila, privilegiado enquanto ponto de convergência dos principais temas e procedimentos do escritor siciliano. Procuramos mostrar como o desejo utópico de regressão a um estado primitivo de consciência, que permeia esses textos como principal elemento de tensão, tende a escancarar definitivamente a realidade da falência das relações sociais, tema que o autor perseguiu por toda a sua obra. / This dissertation purposes an interpretation of the short stories that constitute the last stage of Luigi Pirandello?s artistic production, followed by the translation of the most important narratives inside the context of this work, some of them unpublished in Portuguese. Our approach is based on the treatment given to the tensions and contradictions of the subjectivity, that here tends to desintegration or waste in the Nature, and its relevancy for the modern aesthetics, both under formal and thematic prisms. The essay is formed by four chapters, discussing the general subject from different works: C?è Qualcuno che Ride, Soffio, Un?Idea and La Casa dell?Agonia, beside the novel Uno, Nessuno e Centomila, privileged as convergence point of the Sicilian writer?s main themes and procedures. We attempt to show how the utopic will of regression to a conciousness primitive condition, that permeates these texts as main tension component, tends to definitely confirm the reality of the social relationships loss, subject chased by the author all over his work.

Richard Feynman once remarked, “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” In Simulating Fiction: Models of Narrative and Literary Culture, I argue for a paradigm shift in literary and cultural criticism. Placing Feynman’s maxim in the context of the humanities, I contend that scholars of literature and culture should embrace a “generative” approach to knowledge production that re-centers the discipline around simulation and modeling as a complement to the field’s traditional reliance on description, interpretation, and critique. Since its inception, literary criticism has lacked methods to model and test claims about how narrative and literary culture work at a fundamental mechanistic level. Over the past decade, the explosive popularity of big data, natural language processing, and machine learning has helped digital humanists discover many striking historical trends and correlations, but it has not solved this basic epistemological problem of explanation. Scholars are better equipped to answer questions of ‘how’ and ‘what’ but not ‘why.’ Computational modeling offers a path forward by extending, complementing, and contradicting humanistic intuition. Whereas literary theory produces knowledge by deduction and big data by induction, simulation does so via abduction—that is, modeling possible causes. Theoretical claims about how narrative and culture work are instantiated algorithmically. Artificial worlds are then grown from the bottom up and their simulated output is validated against real literary and cultural systems. The archive of narrative and cultural theory is brimming with candidate models, ranging from generative storytelling grammars to sociological models of cultural production. Instantiating such theories computationally enables literary scholars to play out the implications in far more vivid detail than is possible solely in the mind’s eye. The most persuasive way to make the case for a new research paradigm is by positive example. Simulating Fiction therefore consists of several extended case studies focused on modeling narrative at various scales. The first three chapters offer an in-depth investigation into the question, “Why do narratives (almost universally) develop characters unequally?” While literary critics would traditionally approach such a question qualitatively, I argue that character development begins as a quantitative phenomenon. To quote the noble laureate P. W. Anderson: “More is different.” If one measures the number of words spoken by each character in a Shakespearean drama, the number of times each character is named in a Victorian novel, and the number of seconds each character appears on-screen in a contemporary American film, the same distribution usually appears—what statisticians call a power law or “long tail.” In a field like literary criticism, which concentrates almost exclusively on the particularity of texts, the discovery of such a large-scale statistical regularity is remarkable. But even more compelling is the question of what causes it. Literary critics are generally trained to seek explanations at the level of historical period, genre, or medium. What, then, should we do when confronted by a pattern that persists despite extreme differences in all three? I contend that we are forced to look below the level of history and form to fundamental mechanisms that operate at the level of narrative structure, cognition, and probability. To lay the foundation for an explanation, I develop a series of models, each of which is capable of generating a “long tail” distribution and has a plausible interpretation in the context of narrative. These include: (1) a model of forces of “unification” and “diversification” in narrative structure that determine the shape of character development; (2) an information theoretic model of how authors “maximize entropy” by pushing the limits of creative exploration within the constraints of memory, empathy, and attention; (3) a “building block” model in which characters are composed through the accumulation of characteristics; and (4) a “rich get richer” model in which major and minor characters are differentiated through a positive feedback loop. While the first three chapters investigate narrative at the scale of character, the fourth chapter widens focus to the scale of plot. I explore the question, “Can social network models generate what we consider ‘plot’?” Network theory has become extremely popular within the digital humanities over the past decade as a means of measuring and visualizing the relationships between characters within texts. Such descriptive networks, however, are merely a trace of the underlying literary phenomenon—a forensic tool, like an X-ray, for visualizing plot after the fact. My concern in the fourth chapter is to invert and elevate the use of literary networks by simulating their dynamics to generate “proto-narratives.” As a case study, I develop the first computational model of “triangular desire,” an influential theory of character psychology proposed by philosopher and literary critic René Girard in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961), along with a simulation of Structural Balance Theory, a sociological model of group formation based on patterns of friendship and enmity. My goal is to demonstrate the potential of modeling and simulation as disciplinary practices for the humanities and to make allies and converts of an interdisciplinary audience, including literary and cultural critics, digital humanists, computational social scientists, and complexity theorists.

The diploma thesis introduces critically selected theoretical concepts that try to describe characteristics of children's and youth literature (further: LPDM). It focuses on approx. last thirty years of foreign research in LPDM. Firstly, the attention is paid to theories analyzing LPDM for specific qualities of appropriate texts. Then, the thesis presents theories which primarily describe LPDM on the base of specific context: the context in which the works emerged and are (expertly and non-expertly) received. Finally, the diploma thesis concerns with the potential benefit of presented theories but also with their problematic parts. By that it tries to offer new tools of productive analysis and interpretation of LPDM to Czech discourse of literary science.

A pesquisa “Entre bruxos, vampiros, divergentes e zumbis: a formação do leitor literário na escola” tem como objetivo perceber em que medida o projeto de leitura “Filme e Livro” contribuiu para o reconhecimento do letramento literário na escola de Ensino Fundamental como parte do contexto do ensino de Língua Portuguesa voltado para uma Educação Linguística com vista à formação de leitores literários, bem como esboçar possibilidades teóricas e metodológicas para continuidade deste Projeto. Com esta finalidade, a pesquisa foi realizada em três fases: teórica, estabelecimento dos pressupostos teóricos numa perspectiva transdisciplinar balizada pela Linguística Aplicada e envolvendo conceitos da Linguística, da Teoria Literária e da Pedagogia; reflexiva, contendo relato docente e análise dos dados obtidos através de questionário com os alunos egressos do Projeto Filme e Livro e projetiva, alinhamento das fases anteriores para o esboço de possibilidades teóricas e metodológicas de utilização de textos literários comercias (de massa) e canônicos (clássicos) para o desenvolvimento de projetos que visem ao letramento literário. / The research "Among witches, vampires, divergents, and zombies: the formation of the literary reader in school" aims to understand to what extent the reading project "Film and Book" contributed to the recognition of literary literacy in an elementary school, where the focus of Portuguese language teaching is on linguistic education aimed at the formation of literary readers, as well as to design theoretical and methodological possibilities for the continuity of this project. For this purpose, the research was conducted in three phases: theoretical, establishing theoretical assumptions in a transdisciplinary perspective based on Applied Linguistics and involving concepts of Linguistics, Literary Theory and Pedagogy; reflective, containing a teacher report and data analysis obtained through a questionnaire with former students from the “Film and Book” project; and projective, aligning the previous phases to the outlining of theoretical and methodological possibilities of using commercial literary texts (mass literature) and canonical ones (classics) for the development of projects aimed at literary literacy.

A pesquisa “Entre bruxos, vampiros, divergentes e zumbis: a formação do leitor literário na escola” tem como objetivo perceber em que medida o projeto de leitura “Filme e Livro” contribuiu para o reconhecimento do letramento literário na escola de Ensino Fundamental como parte do contexto do ensino de Língua Portuguesa voltado para uma Educação Linguística com vista à formação de leitores literários, bem como esboçar possibilidades teóricas e metodológicas para continuidade deste Projeto. Com esta finalidade, a pesquisa foi realizada em três fases: teórica, estabelecimento dos pressupostos teóricos numa perspectiva transdisciplinar balizada pela Linguística Aplicada e envolvendo conceitos da Linguística, da Teoria Literária e da Pedagogia; reflexiva, contendo relato docente e análise dos dados obtidos através de questionário com os alunos egressos do Projeto Filme e Livro e projetiva, alinhamento das fases anteriores para o esboço de possibilidades teóricas e metodológicas de utilização de textos literários comercias (de massa) e canônicos (clássicos) para o desenvolvimento de projetos que visem ao letramento literário. / The research "Among witches, vampires, divergents, and zombies: the formation of the literary reader in school" aims to understand to what extent the reading project "Film and Book" contributed to the recognition of literary literacy in an elementary school, where the focus of Portuguese language teaching is on linguistic education aimed at the formation of literary readers, as well as to design theoretical and methodological possibilities for the continuity of this project. For this purpose, the research was conducted in three phases: theoretical, establishing theoretical assumptions in a transdisciplinary perspective based on Applied Linguistics and involving concepts of Linguistics, Literary Theory and Pedagogy; reflective, containing a teacher report and data analysis obtained through a questionnaire with former students from the “Film and Book” project; and projective, aligning the previous phases to the outlining of theoretical and methodological possibilities of using commercial literary texts (mass literature) and canonical ones (classics) for the development of projects aimed at literary literacy.

A pesquisa “Entre bruxos, vampiros, divergentes e zumbis: a formação do leitor literário na escola” tem como objetivo perceber em que medida o projeto de leitura “Filme e Livro” contribuiu para o reconhecimento do letramento literário na escola de Ensino Fundamental como parte do contexto do ensino de Língua Portuguesa voltado para uma Educação Linguística com vista à formação de leitores literários, bem como esboçar possibilidades teóricas e metodológicas para continuidade deste Projeto. Com esta finalidade, a pesquisa foi realizada em três fases: teórica, estabelecimento dos pressupostos teóricos numa perspectiva transdisciplinar balizada pela Linguística Aplicada e envolvendo conceitos da Linguística, da Teoria Literária e da Pedagogia; reflexiva, contendo relato docente e análise dos dados obtidos através de questionário com os alunos egressos do Projeto Filme e Livro e projetiva, alinhamento das fases anteriores para o esboço de possibilidades teóricas e metodológicas de utilização de textos literários comercias (de massa) e canônicos (clássicos) para o desenvolvimento de projetos que visem ao letramento literário. / The research "Among witches, vampires, divergents, and zombies: the formation of the literary reader in school" aims to understand to what extent the reading project "Film and Book" contributed to the recognition of literary literacy in an elementary school, where the focus of Portuguese language teaching is on linguistic education aimed at the formation of literary readers, as well as to design theoretical and methodological possibilities for the continuity of this project. For this purpose, the research was conducted in three phases: theoretical, establishing theoretical assumptions in a transdisciplinary perspective based on Applied Linguistics and involving concepts of Linguistics, Literary Theory and Pedagogy; reflective, containing a teacher report and data analysis obtained through a questionnaire with former students from the “Film and Book” project; and projective, aligning the previous phases to the outlining of theoretical and methodological possibilities of using commercial literary texts (mass literature) and canonical ones (classics) for the development of projects aimed at literary literacy.