Zugleich: Diss. Hagen Fernuniv., 2008. / Literaturverz.

Zugleich: Diss. Hagen Fernuniv., 2008. / Literaturverz.

This dissertation makes the case that treating digitized corpora of literary works as cognitive artifacts can provide particular insight into how the reading mind apprehends events within an imagined world and, thereby, provide potentially useful functional models for event perception, emotional memory, and determining what’s “real.” Most essentially, it will make the case that the deepest feature of narrative cognition may involve an “information distribution” assessment, wherein the variation of information density over time cues the mind to attend to denser events with increased attention, potentially saving more of their content for long-term memory. This mimics what cognitive research has frequently established for real-world processing of emotionally stimulating events, wherein emotional memory tends to be better retained over time, with more detail, fewer conflations, and more resistance to fading, while neutral events tend to be relegated to gist or forgotten. Put together, this produces an ordering of autobiographical memory that resembles a glimmering string of pearls: densely detailed memories strung together over time, separated by thinner, looser memories and gist, with a particular cluster of these “pearls” towards the middle for the memory bump of the mid-teens to mid-twenties. While many have argued for larger schemas or socially influenced self-regard as the major driver for memory emphasis in one’s Life Story, if autobiographical memory is anything like a novel, it may prove a bit simpler: most of the bigger pearls mark where one’s sensory array “dilated” in moments of arousal, and their lustrous, persistent “shine” may be a matter of how likely it was that one returned to those memories over time. Chapter 1 examines what we do and don’t know about the reading mind, settling on a narrower definition of immersive narrative reading as an exceptional cognitive state which moves in and out of what cognitive psychologists call “flow” and a more passive, vivid “daydream.” This is an inherently unstable activity that requires a great deal of assistance from the text, thereby providing useful targets of analysis for researchers interested in perception, emotion, and memory, with a particular eye towards embodied cognition. It then discusses key gaps in the scientific literature and literary scholarship around event perception and narrative cognition, some of which this project aims to partially fill through quantitative analysis of literary texts. This chapter will also discuss the promise and perils of treating literary corpora like the novels in Project Gutenberg as cognitive artifacts: the known limitations of using “canon” texts as a representative sample of literature in general, the rarity of reading, and what it means to “backsolve” cognition through its artifacts. Chapter 2 describes a series of experiments conducted on a corpus of a few thousand novels and nonfiction narratives contained in Project Gutenberg and the Nickels and Dimes Project. Leaning on the “string of pearls” metaphor for autobiographical memory organization, this chapter will promote a model of long-form narrative’s fundamental mnemonics as something that mimics that organizational pattern: information density that varies over time, predicting not only the pace of in-narrative time passing, but which “moments” or features of the narrative will be important for the reader to remember over multiple reading events, while others will be forgotten or relegated to gist. This pattern closely mimics models of autobiographical memory in cognitive psychology, not only of so-called “flashbulb memory” or surprising, high-affect events, but also of Life Story in general: vast periods of fleeting detail, with dense memory clusters around events that were encoded in moments of arousal, with curious memory affects just before and after those events, possibility illustrating what Jefferey Zacks presents as a “gating” model of event perception. Drawing on the scientific literature on event segmentation, arousal and memory, and time perception, and likewise drawing on literary scholarship on time and stylistics in the novel, this chapter will explore the implications and limitations of using POS tagging to try and tease out quantifiable units of “information” from large corpora of novels utilizing one-way repeated measures MANOVA. Applications for these findings in literary scholarship will be discussed throughout—for instance, while scenes involving sex or violence are predictably information-dense in most texts in the corpus that were hand-scored for accuracy (and subsequently used as training texts for the algorithm), in-book variation from the norm and from nearby passages is more predictive than a raw density score alone. For example, when Stephen Dedalus has sex in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, imagistic detail goes down compared to nearby scenes and compared to the more detail-dense passages in the text, which seems to be typical of Joyce: while he does vary density according to temporality and that maps roughly to “significant” scenes, the most emotional scenes tend to be written more sparely (spare for that author, that is—Joyce is not Hemingway). That may be an authorial quirk, or it may be that he relies upon a second strategy to stimulate a reader’s emotional response: semantic content that’s normally cued to a strong negative or positive valence. Chapter 3 will attend to the ways some authors resist narrative’s “ease of use” in order to prompt their readers to interrogate what’s Real. This chapter zooms in on a specific period of American and British literature, and a genre within that brief time: the rise of Creative Nonfiction and/or New Journalism, with a close read or “case study” of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. This chapter proposes that the authors set out to create narratives that would reflect the “real” lives of their subjects, with an objective of making those lives feel real to their readership. But were they successful? Drawing on cognitive psychology research in psychosis, metacognition, and temporal sense, this chapter aims to elucidate how literary narratives like these may “aim to fail” at certain features of deep narrative form (as discussed in the prior chapters) in order to “startle” their readers into a less passive state, in order to better mimic the qualia of witnessing something in the real world, and thereby produce a sense that the subjects within the text are Real. These embedded structural failures are often more subtle than anything Brechtian, but nevertheless can be found both quantitatively and in close reading, which may indicate that when a long-form narrative text purposefully aims to make a reader uncomfortably aware of Reality--especially when motivated by known, deep ethical concerns--it may “work” in ways that have less to do with the subject or content of the text and more to do with form.

This thesis will examine the representation, consequence and transformation of the idea of authorship in the work of James Joyce and suggest a way of re-addressing the contentious question of authorship. While postmodern criticism has emphasised the “revolutionary” cultural and political ramifications of Joyce’s response and the ways that his work has helped to deconstruct this question for modernity and postmodernity, this thesis will trace the ideas and ideologies, individuals and characters, historical, cultural and biographical circumstances that contributed to both the prominence and the hermeneutical consequence of the question of authorship in Joyce’s work. Highlighting Joyce’s awareness of and fascination with the multivalency of a question shaped by theological, historical, political, philosophical, philological, epistemological, methodological and hermeneutical ideas as well as literary representations, it will examine Joyce’s reformulation and response to this question through four pervasive models of authorship in his work: critic, philosopher, bard and theologian. While each chapter will make a distinction between these models in order to analyse their characteristics and significance, as a way of tracing not only the evolution of these models but also the complex network of interrelation that is established between these distinctive but also intertwining ideas of authorship, the thesis will be structured historically, biographically and “ergographically” (in Barthes’ definition of an ‘ergography’) as well as thematically. As a way of approaching the ideologically overdetermined concept of authorship, but also avoiding another postmodern “renaming” of this concept, these models will be proffered in order to examine the construction, fabrication and invention as well as the deconstruction of the idea of authorship and the representation of the role of the author in fiction, culture, society and history in the work of Joyce. The “drama” of authorship will be interpreted in terms of Joyce’s fictional and hermeneutic dramatisation of the role and idea of the author, but also in terms of the consequence of Joyce’s interest in and early idealisation of the genre of drama. This thesis will finally suggest that Joyce’s “failure” to become a dramatist and engagement with philosophical analyses of this genre contributed significantly to his deconstruction, reconstruction and dramatisation of the role and “exagmination” of the author. The thesis as a whole will delineate how each of these four models gradually becomes more distinctive but simultaneously also inextricable from a variegated template that is only methodologically divided into four parts; the four exegetes in Finnegans Wake inconspicuously multiply. The first three chapters will follow the attempt outlined in Joyce’s early draft of the Portrait ‘to liberate from the personalised lumps of matter that which is their individuating rhythm, the first or formal relation of their parts’- the growing self-consciousness of the artist’s understanding of his role(s) as an artist and of the idea(s) of authorship. In the last two chapters that will look at Ulysses and Finnegans Wake these four models will be more clearly differentiated although the growing theatricality in their portrayal and widening nexus of relations will complicate and indeed undermine the idea of a “model”.

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This dissertation is a study of the relationship between the modern Künstlerromane of Arnold Bennett, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf and issues of embodiment. Born of the field of aesthetics, the literary genre of Künstlerroman inherits its conflicts. The chief dilemma of the form is how an isolated artistic consciousness connects with the world through a creative act. Bennett, Joyce, and Woolf offer different and contradictory resolutions. By examining how each writer conceives the body, I discover in Woolf the idea of an ethical aesthetics that contravenes the assumed polarity between mind and body, between self and other, and between material and ideal. Written only a few years apart, Clayhanger (1910), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and The Voyage Out (1915) tell a compelling story of the relationship between embodiment and a creative life.

Doctor of Philosophy / This is a study of the composition of three Modernist first editions: Ulysses (1922), The Making of Americans (1925) and A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930). The bibliographical and figurative commitments made to being in print by Ulysses, A Draft of XXX Cantos and The Making of Americans set a coherent program for reading Modernist texts in their perfected form: in print. The editorial reception of the Modernist book has proceeded, however, with reference to the editorial and bibliographical principles established by the New Bibliographers. In deferring to the authors and manuscripts of Modernist books as the highest source of textual authority, the vital significance of being in print to literary Modernism is obscured. The figure of the ideal Book concentrates the central aesthetic, intellectual and bibliographic problem posed the Modernist book: the making of literature. The rhyme with The Making of Americans is appropriate: this book intensifies and consolidates the propositions made about objective and autonomous composition made more hesitantly by Ulysses and A Draft of XXX Cantos. These three books display a gradual refusal to equate inscription and intention; their composition effaces all traces of a sovereign creative subjectivity. The vision of the book guides Modernist composition, and requires a critical distinction be drawn between manuscripts and printed letters. Modernism must be read in print. The vestigial nostalgia for Romantic modes of textual production and creation in Ulysses is repeated on the placards and proof-pages for the book. Printed drafts are revised and reformed by the pen of the author. The finality asserted by the printed letter is only reluctantly ceded on the publication of Ulysses. The composition of A Draft of XXX Cantos represents a further transition away from the script economy of Romanticism. The interplay between authorial typescripts, early publications and the first edition of A Draft of XXX Cantos assert an intermediate order of Modernist textuality which takes the printed page as its foundation. The Making of Americans relies on the absolute objectivity and anonymity of its composition for the effect of its narrative. Objectivity is the intellectual and aesthetic strategy which produces literature rather than the personality and memory of the author. The impersonality of the apparently automatically written manuscripts and scarcely revised typescripts for The Making of Americans severs the visible links between the writing author and her page. In their unwillingness to corroborate the modes of textual generation described by the New Bibliographers, these three books thematise their own composition as the exemplary Modernist and modern mode of textual generation. The Modernist book attenuates or denies a Romantic connection between the creative hand of the author and the surface image of the page: the mechanisms of print deliberately detach the author from the literary text. The distance of the author from the scene of textual reproduction is measured by the printed book. The composition of this analytical object is not a fallacy but an actuality, commemorated in the archive, enacted by the book. Modernism is the literature of the imprimatur rather than of authorial inscription and accordingly it is towards the first editions of Modernist texts that the attentions of editors and textual scholars must be directed.

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce used the form or structure of his language to connote a meaning which supported the content of the text. The elements of form he used most often were sentence and paragraph structure, punctuation, rhythm, and classical rhetorical schemes. By manipulating these, he gained three benefits: he supplied an emotional appeal to the content, he represented his epistemological beliefs in his language, and he gave elegance to his prose. Background research reveals the influences that led to Joyce using form to support content. They include his Jesuit education, his own predisposition to the connotative aspects of language, and his literary work previous to Portrait. The examination of the text of Portrait exhibits the particular ways Joyce used the elements of form to fit content. Several of the highly emotional episodes of the story, the most likely to contain form-fitting-content examples, are examined in detail. Attention is given to rhetorical schemes of repetition because it is through these schemes that emotional pitch is adjusted in the story. Joyce's innovative use of syntactical structures to fit content, and his application of such poetic forms as rhythm and meter to simulate physical action are discussed. An examination of the end of the book, a section where rhetorical schemes and structural manipulation seems to disappear, shows how the apparent lack of connotative elements is appropriate to making a new form fit a new content. The use of form to support content in Portrait was an artistic commitment which Joyce began in Portrait. He would continue and intensify his commitment in all of his writing after Portrait. How Joyce wrote would always thereafter be determined by what he wrote about. / Graduation date: 1995

Texte remanié de : Thèse doctorat : Littérature comparée : Paris 3 : 2000. / Bibliogr. p. [301]-312. Notes bibliogr. Index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 400-412). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.