"La lente bifocale": lineamenti metodologici di una possibile storia del "campo" poetico italiano degli anni Settanta del Novecento

Reading for the Planet: Toward a GeomethodologyGatekeepers: The Emergence of World Literature and the 1960s

Close Reading on a Global Scale

Digital search and visualisation technologies are combined into one methodological approach for structural public debate analysis of digital print and audiovisual media data archives called the “leveled approach”. This approach is conceptualised, developed and used for research into drug discourse in Dutch news media debates in this thesis, which consists ... read more of four studies into the reputation of drugs in post-war Dutch newspaper and radio debates. As each study contributes to digital method development in Digital Humanities and to the field of drug history, a section describing the digital search and analysis trajectory in the digitised media archive (distant reading) precedes each historical narrative (close reading). The four studies explore how the reputation of amphetamine (in chapter 1) and ecstasy (in chapters 2, 3 and 4) developed in a context of national drug regulation in the Netherlands. In this way, the hypothesis that Dutch drug regulation has been subject to an increasingly strong imperative to regulate in the post-war period is studied in the media domain. The findings of the four studies lead to three main conclusions about the development of the reputation of drugs in a context of discursive dynamics specific to the newspaper and radio debates. First, the discursive formation of drugs developed at a pace that was to some degree independent from developments in drug regulation: public unrest in the newspapers preceded amphetamine regulation, while ecstasy was commonly treated as a soft drug on the radio for many years after being classified as a hard drug. Second, the reputation of these drugs developed in a cross-media landscape in which international issues and local issues also had significant effects. Third, the discursive formation of ecstasy is best understood as multifaceted and contested, revolving around contrasting discursive strands defined by meaning constellations of 1) descriptions of the substance; 2) commonly connected actors; and 3) settings. In newspaper articles these discursive strands appeared mostly independently from each other, whereas they were most obvious in clashes between disagreeing stakeholders in discussions on the radio. This shows that analysing radio and newspaper archives enables an enriched perspective on historical cross-media debates. I suggest two leads for further structural research of digitised media debates. First, the leveled approach can be used as a structural framework for combining distant and close reading in OCR- and/or ASR metadata-enriched archives. This makes possible cross-media public debate research across print and audiovisual media archives. Second, this thesis’ consistent explication of the search and visualisation trajectory - the explication of the iterative space between distant and close reading - shows how to achieve a level of transparency that fosters improved opportunities for self reflection and peer review for cross-media public debate analysis based on distant and close reading. Moreover, this practice makes it possible to answer historical research questions using analysis of digital media data archives that face challenges related to (meta)data scarcity, uneven/changing (meta)data availability and continuous technological change. show less

In 2005, Franco Moretti introduced Distant Reading to analyse entire literary text collections. This was a rather revolutionary idea compared to the traditional Close Reading, which focuses on the thorough interpretation of an individual work. Both reading techniques are the prior means of Visual Text Analysis. We present an overview of the research conducted since 2005 on supporting text analysis tasks with close and distant reading visualizations in the digital humanities. Therefore, we classify the observed papers according to a taxonomy of text analysis tasks, categorize applied close and distant reading techniques to support the investigation of these tasks and illustrate approaches that combine both reading techniques in order to provide a multi‐faceted view of the textual data. In addition, we take a look at the used text sources and at the typical data transformation steps required for the proposed visualizations. Finally, we summarize collaboration experiences when developing visualizations for close and distant reading, and we give an outlook on future challenges in that research area.

Since the work of Franco Moretti, 'distant reading' has become a research method in literature departments. But what is at stake in this kind of reading? Are 'close reading' and 'distant reading' really opposites or can both these approaches be employed at the same time?

Numerous studies on text visualization have been long conducted around the world for distant and close reading. Nevertheless, in Malay language, a lot of research works on text visualization are focusing more on distant reading as compared to close reading. Thus, there is still lacking on determining textual feature for in-depth analysis of Malay texts. This paper discusses the Malay texts features that involve in designing the pronunciation of Malay consonants. The design process starts by analyzing articulation table and the standard articulation part of human mouth. The important parameters are identified from both sources in order to represent such data and symbols in a glyph visualization. Each glyph representation illustrates the simplified version of pronouncing the consonants. This research gives benefit to scholars who learn Malay language as a second language, specifically concentrating on pronouncing a precise Malay consonant.Â

We explore through the lens of distant reading the evolution of discourse on Jews in France during the XIX century. We analyze a large textual corpus including heterogeneous sources—literary works, periodicals, songs, essays, historical narratives—to trace how Jews are associated to different semantic domains, and how such associations shift over time. Our analysis deals with three key aspects of such changes: the overall transformation of embedding spaces, the trajectories of word associations, and the comparative projection of different religious groups over different, historically relevant semantic dimensions or streams of discourse. This allows to show changes in the association between words and semantic domains (referring e.g. to economic and moral behaviors), the evolution of stereotypes, and the dynamics of bias over a long time span characterized by major historical transformations. We suggest that the analysis of large textual corpora can be fruitfully used in a dialogue with more traditional close reading approaches—by pointing to opportunities of in-depth analyses that mobilize more qualitative approaches and a detailed inspection of the sources that distant reading inevitably tends to aggregate. We offer a short example of such a dialogue between different approaches in our discussion of the Second Empire transformations, where we mobilize the historian’s tools to start disentangling the complex interactions between changes in French society, the nature of sources, and representations of Jews. While our example is limited in scope, we foresee large potential payoffs in the cooperative interaction between distant and close reading.

By way of a textual analysis of the reports on high fashion shows of the French newspaper Le Monde and the British newspaper The Guardian, this study is a reflection on Bourdieu's sociology of culture. Drawing on Bourdieu's notion of symbolic production, I comment on the construction of fashion as popular culture in The Guardian and as high culture in Le Monde. The investigation of the versions of culture constructed by the two newspapers allows me to reflect on the theoretical framework Bourdieu has developed in his discussion of the field of culture and the traditional opposition between the high and the popular which structures it. Bourdieu's sociology is a product of a specific field of production, the French: like many French researchers, he shows little interest in mass culture - his sociology of the field of fashion is a case in point -, and privileges culture as high culture. Popular culture - working class culture - is not acknowledged as a culture per se. Many of Bourdieu's concepts, such as 'cultural capital' or 'symbolic production' can usefully be applied to an analysis of the field of popular culture, but this is a step he does not take. If adequate to understand certain cultural experiences and discourses, Bourdieu's model is inadequate to understand others, but proves to be a rigid theoretical model which fails to account for the complexity and diversity of the field of popular culture, and ultimately fails to break with the cultural doxa. Finally, although Bourdieu insists that sociologists should pay attention to the discourses of symbolic production of culture, he himself fails to engage with them, focusing on their field production rather than on the meanings they convey. In contrast, this study is concerned with the meanings created in the process of symbolic production of fashion.

In recent decades, the controversy over distant vs. close reading has revolved around the spatiotemporal question of scaling. Participants in the debate have either advocated distance (or speed) or have insisted on proximity (or slowness). On a meta-critical level, some have even argued for the need for any reading to be able to shift between, and thus to combine, different scales. Very little has been said, however, about the limitations of scaling as such, and the irreducibility of reading to the logic of scales. Starting out from a few intricate formulations by some proponents of close and distant reading, this paper attempts to investigate the potentials and limitations of scaling, first by references to “Stanford” (the university as well as its founder), then by looking into Walter Benjamin’s treatment of film, and finally, though most importantly, by re-reading some passages in Poe’s detective story “The Purloined Letter.” These three points of reference (Stanford, Benjamin, Poe) seem analogous in the way they lay mutual emphasis on both serialization and segmentation, fast and slow motion, or distance and proximity. On a closer (or more distant?) look, however, Poe’s text goes even beyond such a scheme of scaling. It testifies to a logic of detection which surpasses mere zooming-in or zooming-out strategies, and points to a notion of reading that is “escalated” not simply because of its extraordinary range in terms of velocity or distance, but more radically because, although it still binds reading to specific scales, it also has an aspect that remains utterly heterogeneous to any logic of scaling. The paper attempts to highlight this radically “escalated” (out-of-scale) aspect of reading.

This paper examines some of the issues surrounding this ‘computational turn’ and proposes a ‘human focused’ approach. It begins by addressing questions concerning whether there is a need empirical evidence in literary studies, and the roles played by human and technical agents in interpretative practices. It adopts Don Ihde Postphenomenological ideas (especially ‘embodiment’ and ‘hermeneutics’ human-technology relations) to expatiate on the nature of relationship that exists between a literary scholar and a computational tool during interpretative practices. On one hand, it uses postphenomenomelogy as a theoretical framework to provides rich conceptual terminologies by which we could interrogate humanists-computer relationship within the practice of computational textual analysis. And on the other hand, uses postphenomenology method to highlight the notion of subjectivity in contrast to the promise of observer-independent objectivity. The research appraise the impact of quantification and visualizations in literary studies using the research output of Franco Moretti and his colleagues at the Stanford Lit Lab, as well as performs textual experimentation on some corpora using Stefan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell’s Voyant tools and Python NLP packages. But refutes the idea that quantification and visualization of textual data with the use of computational tools and methods could guarantee objectivity of textual interpretation in literary studies. The argument in this paper is divided across its three sections: The first section discusses the goal of reading; it concerns ‘Close reading’ and ‘Distant reading’. The second section questions the possibility of objectivity in textual interpretation using quantifiable and visual evidence provided as the output of the computational analysis of humanistic texts. Then, in the third section defends the following claims: a) the human person is the principal actor in the interpretation process, and all other forms of representation or visualisation of the text are meant to aid humans; b. data in the humanities are not limited to printed texts, but include digitised, born-digital and electronic text in various digital forms (images, sounds, videos, etc.); c. the humanities aim more at interpretive practices than a quest for verifiable knowledge; d. interpretative practices in the humanities focus on humans and their experiences; e. attention must be drawn to human developers' subjectivity whenever we are using computational interpretative tools – on the ground that this will help in bracketing of our biases, prejudices, preconceptions, and theoretical frameworks. The paper concludes with the argument that computational tools used for textual analysis in the humanities need interpretation as they are not neutral in hermeneutic practices. It argues that the humans involved in the creation of those tools are prone to errors, have preferences, and incorporate their subjective ideas into developmental processes. Then proposes ‘Hermeneutical Postphenomenology’ as an ideal lens through which the claim to objectivity could be debunked. Then recommends that our productivity in textual scholarship can be enriched when we understand the true nature of the relationship between the human inquirer and technical agents within the cognitive assemblage.

On Pierre Bourdieu<i>Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture.</i>Pierre Bourdieu , Jean-Claude Passeron , Richard Nice<i>Outline of a Theory of Practice.</i>Pierre Bourdieu , Richard Nice

In the 2011 issue of the MLA's Profession, David Porter notes that, following Goethe's call for a new age of Weltliteratur in the early nineteenth century, since the mid-1990s the notion of “world literature” has reemerged “as the most promising rubric for imagining a major paradigm shift in the study and teaching of literature and for thinking beyond the dead ends of traditional comparative study.”1While no consensus has been reached on what it might mean, this recent reemergence of the notion of world literature has become a focus for debate over new possibilities implicit in the idea of global literatures. Porter cites in particular three noteworthy avenues for critical discussion: David Damrosch's What Is World Literature?, Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters, and Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees. Like other contributors to this forum, I find these three works particularly suggestive of the current state of thinking concerning comparative literary studies.In What is World Literature?, Damrosch develops a framework for world literature that is cosmopolitan in terms of a multiplicity not of origins but of trajectories. That is, world literatures are literatures that circulate beyond their cultures of origin and in doing so have an effect on other cultures beyond the linguistic and institutional borders circumscribed by overtly national literatures.2Casanova offers in The World Republic of Letters a sociological account of the world of literature as a rule-bound, hierarchical formation. The “world republic of letters,” she argues, is not the open, liberal, democratic marketplace of ideas but a “rigidly stratified social structure where access to broad markets is tightly controlled by a powerful caste of critics, publishers, and translators, whose authority is legitimized through their association with recognized literary centers such as Paris or New York.”3 This caste of gatekeepers functions across political and linguistic lines and helps create a body of literary works that share metropolitan features, even when they come from outside French or English, the traditional sites of “world literature.”In Graphs, Maps, Trees, Moretti also takes literary circulation and transformation as his starting point but offers a set of more radical methodological alternatives—drawing as models for literary analysis “graphs from quantitative history, maps from geography, and trees from evolutionary theory”—in proposing that literary scholars rethink their dependence on close reading.4 “Distant reading,” distance being understood as “a specific form of knowledge,” reveals what close reading cannot.5 As Porter rightly notes, this attention to the macroscopic patterns and processes that shape the literary landscape works on scales beyond individual texts and authors, and its most obvious benefit is that it includes the 99 percent of literary production typically excluded by any canon from visibility and relevance.6Porter concludes from his survey of the return of “world literature” that what Damrosch, Casanova, and Moretti share is a concept of world literature that “stresses the mobility of texts and the permeability of traditions.”7 Each makes clear that world literature is not the sum of national literatures “but rather a dynamic model of … a constantly shifting field of circulation, transmutation, and contestation.”8 This conclusion is of central concern: what might a field of comparative studies that was not based on national literatures, or even singular canonic examples, look like? How would such a field be organized? And is the MLA structure, indeed any institutional structure, adequate to the study of transnational literary formations?As a scholar who has learned from and adapted these observations to my own main area of comparative study, the hemispheric Americas, I think that the work of this group of literary historians helps us reconsider what Porter identifies as the “relation between the processes of differentiation and diffusion that govern the spread and regeneration of literary forms in a global literary space.”9 In that context, probably the first observation worth making is that a new vocabulary for naming, studying, and comparing the hemispheric Americas and their literatures has emerged over the past twenty years, representing a battery of interesting alternatives to be considered. With the emergence of other approaches, such as diasporic studies, comparative studies in race and ethnicity, studies in globalization and the global South, and the transnational turn in cultural studies, coupled with the resurgence of the very idea of world literature itself, the fundamental terms of analysis and description in the context of contemporary comparative literary study deserve highlighting.Globalization and the vision of the globe implied by that contemporary term of everyday discourse do not just belong to the neocons, neoliberals, or end-of-history triumphalists. The “world” of “world literature” and of diverse cultural studies and changing disciplinary practices is also becoming globalized and “worlded” in a Heideggerian sense that denotes how things become intelligible to human beings by virtue of being part of an interpreted and structured context of meaning.10 This “worlding” of world literature produces alternative expressions of what can count and mean as “literature” that are every bit as powerful as critical terms as the former vocabularies of ideological analysis. These terms emphasize the public impact of the emergence of global systems from disparate critical angles of vision, multiple frameworks, social situations, and knowledge/power field practices that are, as yet, emerging, fluid, and undertheorized. The point of these critical angles of vision is not simply hermeneutical. More powerfully, they carry out social analyses of contemporary ruling structures with the end of formulating the possibility of social justice.The transdisciplinary practices, transnational literacies, and multisited interventions that globalization and the idea of world literature projects require help us envision and shape keener expressions of what contemporary differential, transnational, and borderlands projects can and must do now, moving beyond the postmodern/postcolonial formulations of “comparative world literatures.” What is crucial in all of these formulations is the sense that no process of worlding or globalization is anywhere near over and done with as a historical process of world formation. So how are we going to talk about it even as it continues to change before our very eyes? The goal of programs of study based in attempts to reformulate the goals of comparative literature and comparative cultural studies generally is one of turning emergent forms of theorizing and cultural activist writing into new cultural poetics adequate to dealing with new world realities. I take this project to coincide with the one that Gayatri Spivak described recently as one of “translation”—that is, as a process of poiesis that is not mere imitation of an original but an imaginative creation in another mode, situated in the very differential between copy and original.11Current debates on the meaning of citizenship have refocused attention away from notions of civil rights that depend on the existence of a social contract within the framework of the nation-state and toward ways in which the processes of decolonization and migration, as well as social identities based on ethnicity, race, and sexuality, point to the existence of identities other than national ones for defining citizenship. They offer a direct challenge to the traditional language of citizenship and liberal democratic notions that tie citizenship and liberal democratic rights indissolubly to state affiliation.So, what happens when we move the discussion of citizenship and “rights” away from the idea of the nation state, not toward a mythic postnational state but instead to the realm of the transnation? The fictive entities with subject status that we call corporations have worked imaginatively precisely to create a sense of those transnational rights. One powerful function of aesthetic education in the age of globalization might be then to teach us how to conceive of transnational rights for individual and collective bodies of subjects, represented most saliently by the participants in the massive labor diasporas from south to north in the last decades of the twentieth century. This is the actively creative act of poiesis in translation that Spivak refers to in regard to a rethinking of comparativism, a process that she describes as “an active practice.”12This concern for the active practice of translation as an act of re-creation is acutely visible in the area of comparative work, which is my own—the transnational literatures of the Americas. These literatures, represented most powerfully by such works as Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper, typically draw not only from the grand traditions of the various American national literatures but also from the traditions of vernacular narrative, popular culture, and the literary avant-garde.13 They do so for several reasons, one of which is to show the constant and complete dissonance between the redemptive course of the history of the Americas with its origins in conquest and the psychic façades that bar the way to memories of the traumatic past of the Americas.These are issues I have elaborated more fully in other work.14 In this context, it is worth noting that in Plascencia's and Díaz's writings, as in those of a whole generational cohort of contemporary writers from the transnational American global South, neither literary realism, nor modernist estrangement, nor postmodern play, nor magical realist wonder alone can suffice as formal stand-ins for the concrete content of justice. The representation of social justice is not and should not be taken to be the same thing as its felicitous performance. How, then, can one possibly conceive of a narrativity to still the chaos unleashed by modern political terror? How to create ethnic romance from consciousness colonized by self-hate and self-doubt? What would a literature of political and racial romance, sensation, gothic, marvels, fantasy, and absolute otherness appropriate to transporting us to the margins of the imaginary and the symbolic accomplish that earlier forms of U.S. ethnic literature have not? What would its referential world look like? And most significantly, what could it accomplish as a symbolic representation of real history? In the works of transnational American writers, the representation of social justice requires a new and different formal medium incorporating states of fantasy that occupy and override previous attempts to represent the real. To show how this is accomplished is the task of contemporary comparative literary study.As we move firmly into the second decade of the twenty-first century, what is clear is the need for a new paradigm for broadly global as well as for more local ways of studying culture and literature. This new poiesis of comparative study ought to be based on a new sense of the dynamics of how knowledge is generated and how human resources are used and should recognize the rich reservoir of knowledge that exists in languages and cultures that have in the past not been deemed worthy of study or comparison. The aim of critical work undertaken by comparative studies and comparing literatures worldwide might well be to ensure that the variety of regions that we can for convenience's sake call the global South receive their due on the basis of their own rich heritage in a world of equals that are not classed in the static categories that Casanova decries or the exclusive formulations of cultural political practice to which Moretti's method of “distant reading” offers such a powerful rejoinder. We have an incalculable stake in ensuring the success of the comparative critical projects that points us toward a new, global, sense of world literature.

As developed by Immanuel Wallerstein and various co-thinkers, world-systems analysis is essentially an approach to economic history and historical sociology that has been largely indifferent to literary studies. This indifference is perhaps surprising given that the Annales school, which clearly influenced Wallerstein’s work, produced a foundational account of the emergence of modern western literature in Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s L’apparition du livre (1958). More recently, literary scholars have attempted to apply this kind of analysis directly to their own field. The best-known instances are probably Pascale Casanova’s La republique mondiale des lettres (1999), Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading (2013) and the Warwick Research Collective’s Combined and Uneven Development (2015). More recently still, Andrew Milner in Australia and Jerry Määttä in Sweden have sought to apply “distant reading” more specifically to the genre of science fiction. Milner’s model of the “global SF field” identifies an original Anglo-French core, supplemented by more recent American and Japanese cores, longstanding Russian, German, Polish and Czech semi-peripheries, an emergent Chinese semi-periphery, and a periphery comprising the rest of the world. This essay attempts to apply that model to what Adam Trexler has termed “Anthropocene fictions” and Daniel Bloom “cli-fi”, which we treat here as a significant sub-genre of contemporary science fiction.

Yogyakarta in Indonesia literature is one of the literary arenas that are unseparated from prominent literary writers in Indonesia, such as Korrie Layun Rampan, WS. Rendra, Emha Ainun Nadjib, etc. Those writers are associated to literature community surrounding, such as Korrie Layun Rampan and Emha Ainun Nadjib whose were members of Persada Studi Klub (PSK) in 1969-1977 era. After PSK had dismissed, many literary community appeared to enlighten literary atmosphere in Yogyakarta. In 2000s, Studio Pertunjukan Sastra (SPS) and Sastra Bulan Purnama (SBP) appeared with different ways and styles in activating and appreciating literary works. Before those communities appeared, in 1996, a program (community) had born named Bengkel Sastra (BS) in the initiative of Balai Penelitian Bahasa Yogyakarta (now Balai Bahasa DIY). Bengkel Sastra (BS) offers creative process with applied practices in writing and oral expression through literary performance. BS becomes arena of modal transfer from tutor to participants. The transfer modal enable modal investment of BS's participants in preparing them to be writers in future. This research will focus on modal exchange, agent, and legitimate in BS. To explain those matters, this research used sociology theory of Pierre Bourdieu, particularly modal exchange and legitimate in agents in BS. This research is descriptive. The result shows that BS offers legitimate to agent (participants), although little, to enter literary world through celebrating works (books), and literary works performance orally. Keywords: literary sociology, Bourdieu, modal, legitimate, literary arena, community, Bengkel Sastra.

The article was originally intended as a review of A. I. Reytblat’s book Writing Across: Articles on Biographics, Sociology and History of Literature. However, the text turned into a brief overview and even an attempt to “classify” the works which every sociologist focused on textual analysis should read. Such a change of the author’s intention was determined by three factors. The first is the “methodological trauma” of sociologists who constantly clarify the grounds of their empirical work and conceptualizations under the nowadays-exalted interdisciplinarity of sociology. The second factor is the aggravation of this problem in the field of textual analysis which lacks conventional nominations of analytical approaches, not to mention rules and procedures of the “classical” scientific methodology. The third factor responsible for the change in the author’s intention is the need for some minimum competence in the disciplines that influence textual analysis in sociology and, thus, their impact has to be evaluated in terms of their causes, consequences, and limits. The author identifies four types of non-sociological works on different linguistic aspects of social life that can form such a competence: (1) practical guidelines for the linguistic analysis essential for correct content analytical studies; (2) publicist estimates of the role of language in social life and of the transformations of the current Russian language/discourse; (3) philosophical works devoted not as much to the discursive construction of social reality as to the fundamental role of language in its constitution and destruction, and; (4) works on the social life of texts that can conditionally fit into the notion of the “sociology of literature”.