Set Of Novels Research Articles

The fictionality of topic modeling: Machine reading Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire series

This essay describes how using unsupervised topic modeling (specifically the latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling algorithm in MALLET) on relatively small corpuses can help scholars of literature circumvent the limitations of some existing theories of the novel. Using an example drawn from work on Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire series, it argues that unsupervised topic modeling's counter-factual and retrospective reconstruction of the topics out of which a given set of novels have been created allows for a denaturalizing and unfamiliar (though crucially not “objective” or “unbiased”) view. In other words, topic models are fictions, and scholars of literature should consider reading them as such. Drawing on one aspect of Stephen Ramsay's idea of algorithmic criticism, the essay emphasizes the continuities between “big data” methods and techniques and longer-standing methods of literary study.

Kipps, Belsey, and Jegede: Cosmopolitanism, Transnationalism, and Black Studies in Zadie Smith's On Beauty

Kipps, Belsey, and JegedeCosmopolitanism, Transnationalism, and Black Studies in Zadie Smith's On Beauty Kanika Batra (bio) Zadie Smith's novel On Beauty confirms that the fiction of the second generation Caribbean diaspora has indeed arrived on the international scene, if indeed any confirmation was required after the phenomenal success of Smith's first novel White Teeth.1 The status of Smith's fiction in the Euro-American academy, which is also the setting of On Beauty, encourages an analysis of disciplinarity and institutionalization. Recent criticism has directed attention to Smith's portrayal of the American academy in passing. In a review of Elaine Showalter's Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents, Alan McKenzie points to "complacency both in the novels and campuses" that Showalter examines and concludes by commenting on Smith's On Beauty as a "strange" and "wonderful" novel which he is "not certain" would have benefitted from having been run through the "very fine mill" of Showalter's critical exegesis (759). Examining a set of novels that he calls "academic satires," Charles Green briefly discusses On Beauty as Smith's attempt to bridge "a deeply emotional domestic drama with the public performances of the so-called culture wars" (183). Green critiques the novel's "limp" treatment of the culture wars but commends "how Smith successfully treats race" (185). Kathleen Wall reads Smith's On Beauty and Ian McEwan's Saturday through a theoretical framework derived from Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just, which provides the title to the novel. Wall's reading is a curiously apolitical treatment of Smith's trenchant critique of racial and economic disparities. Taking my cue from these critical opinions, I offer a reading of Smith's representation of blackness in its institutional, social, and aesthetic dimensions. Marking a shift from White Teeth, which documented multicultural Britain through Archie Jones's and Samad Iqbal's British-Jamaican and British-South Asian families, On Beauty is set largely in America, though it briefly references England as well. Presenting the lives of two families, the Kippses and the Belseys, in the college town of Wellington, the novel foregrounds the transnational dimensions of the black diaspora that is the subject of Black Studies as an academic discipline. Smith details a year in the life of Howard Belsey, English by birth, American by residence, art historian by profession, and liberal multicultural by choice. Howard's marriage to Kiki, his "American wife," and his life in the safe environs of Wellington comprises Smith's narrative. This marriage between an Englishman and an African American woman, and the lives of their children, Jerome, Zora, and Levi, are the lens of Smith's ironical explorations of race, class, and gender relations in idyllic Wellington. The idyll is interrupted by the arrival of Sir Monty Kipps, neo-conservative Trinidadian British art historian, housed in the Black Studies Department. The Department [End Page 1079] is home to Howard's closest friend, Nigerian émigré Erskine Jegede, Soyinka Professor of African Literature and Assistant Director of Black Studies, previously a fellow student with Sir Monty at Oxford. The vagueness of Sir Monty's job profile at Wellington or the nature of his duties at Black Studies is in contrast to the neo-conservative anti-affirmative ideas he propounds. Douglas Davidson and Frederick Weaver, writing in the Journal of Black Studies in 1985, wrote that "a central education mission of Black Studies at White institutions is to enable students to see that the rest of the curriculum is White Studies" (344). This utopian hope is unfulfilled at Wellington; in addition, the author's deliberate lack of explanation of Sir Monty's duties as a Visiting Professor as well as Erskine's position indicate that both serve as token additions to the cultural diversity in the Wellington faculty and course offerings. Such tokenism casts doubt—as the author presumably intends—on the very nature and purpose of Black Studies at Wellington. While analyzing Smith's representation of Black Studies it is useful to consider the history of the discipline. Most accounts emphasize that black identity politics and institutional racism were factors contributing to demands for curricular revisions (Hall; Huggins). This article...

"SOME CURIOUS DRAWINGS". MARS THROUGH GIOVANNI SCHIAPARELLI'S EYES: BETWEEN SCIENCE AND FICTION

From the second half of the 19th century up to the first part of the 20th century the drawings of Mars by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli became the centre of an international controversy concerning the existence of canals and the hypothetical habitability of the red planet. These images also generated a full impact on the popular culture of the time. This essays follows the scientific representations of Mars by Schiaparelli (drawings of discs and maps) from their birth in the hands of the astronomy community up to their growing old in the hands of scientific popularizers such as Camille Flammarion and science fiction writers such as Herbert George Wells. With its seas and canyons Mars turned into the ideal background for scientific and exotic romanticism, offering a suitable setting for novels and tales. The core question crossed paths with the contemporary early 20th century debate raging on about the evolutionary theory. The study of Mars moved from astronomy to extraterrestrial physiology, biology, meteorology and geography: astronomical images then became imaginary portraits of Martians and artificial Martian landscapes.

Linguistic Styles of Eminent Writers Suffering From Unipolar and Bipolar Mood Disorder

Past research has shown that the styles of drawings by patients with unipolar and bipolar mood disorder differ, the latter expressing more positive and fewer negative emotions (Wadeson, 1980). In the first study presented here, it was expected that prose texts by eminent writers who suffered from unipolar versus bipolar mood disorder would show this same effect. One novel per writer was analyzed, using Pennebaker, Francis, and Booth's (2001) Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. Results disconfirmed the hypothesis, but indicated 3 other differences that were then replicated in Study 2, using a second set of novels by the same authors. Results indicated that: (a) Bipolar writers referred to death more than did unipolar writers; (b) unipolar writers referred to people other than themselves more than did control writers; (c) unipolar writers used more words describing cognitive mechanisms (e.g., understand, know) than did both other groups. The fact that the unipolar and bipolar groups did not differ from controls on measures related to emotions and feelings can be partially explained in terms of the therapeutic effect of writing (Pennebaker, 1997). The interest displayed by unipolar writers in cognitive mechanisms is consistent with Verhaeghen, Joorman, and Khan's (2005) finding that rumination mediates the link between creativity and unipolar depression.

Farewell to A Farewell to Arms:: Deemphasizing the Whole-Class Novel

ASK ANY group of adults ranging in age from their early twenties to late fifties what they remember about middle or high school reading, and you will no doubt hear an unenthusiastic and often bitter chorus of such titles as To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, and other classic novels long considered standard and acceptable fare in English classrooms. The younger may chime in with Parrot in the Oven, Looking for Alaska, or some other young-adult novels that have become contemporary classics. Not many adults have great memories of assigned reading from English class, yet the one-size-fits-all novel persists as the centerpiece of instruction in many middle and high school classrooms. As teacher educators and former English and reading teachers, we also know that getting students to read these selections continues to be difficult, even in the best of circumstances. A high school memory sums up this situation for us. Gay recalls a nighttime bus ride back from a National Honor Society field trip to an amusement park near the end of her junior year. Nearly a third of the students clustered at the back of the bus with the CliffsNotes for The Scarlet Letter, not because they needed to read it by the following morning but because they had to read it and write a critical analysis of it by the following morning! Even for these high-achieving high-schoolers, the goal was just to get the assignment finished. For struggling students, the choice is apt to be noncompliance. Often, the teacher notices that the students have not read the text and so reads it to them. We know that teacher read-alouds are a powerful tool for building vocabulary and background knowledge, but we worry that they are being used to supplant assigned readings. Read-alouds should extend students' thinking, not replace it. As an alternative, in the hope that students can be coerced into reading a novel that they have been assigned, teachers often resort to testing their knowledge about it. Some teachers give oral summaries of the contents so that students who have not completed their assigned readings can keep up. Others show the film version so that students have a sense of the content. Regardless of which alternative is selected, students are not reading more or reading better as a result of the whole-class novel. Instead, students are reading less and are less motivated, less engaged, and less likely to read in the future. Meanwhile, teachers continue their endless--and often fruitless--search for better ways to persuade students to read their assigned novel. (1) Given this frustration and resistance, what is it about a class set of novels that captivates teachers so much that its use dominates English language arts instruction? We often hear that curriculum standards dictate the decision and require, for example, that all sixth-graders read The Giver or that all ninth-graders read Romeo and Juliet. (Of course, the latter is a play, not a novel, but it is typically assigned and taught in the same way.) But even a cursory review of content standards from several state departments of education reveals that specific texts and authors are not actually named. Rather, students are expected to learn how to read, write, and speak about a variety of texts, and the standards typically emphasize literary devices, reading comprehension skills, and writing strategies. We also hear quite frequently that novels are selected because they are good for students. But we know that classics--and even award-winning contemporary classics--do not make the list of what adolescents prefer to read. (2) In addition, we know that students still struggling to read do not get better at reading from tackling difficult books. (3) It would be hard to locate one book that addresses the needs of all students in any given classroom. Life experiences that enable a reader to make sense of a book vary too greatly, and every has students who read above or below their grade level. …

A Relation of Story to Idea: The Vines of Nancy Kress and Other SF Women

This essay is concerned with some of the responses to the 'toughness' of golden-age SF and to the lack of confidence in that literature in any compromise positions in the harsh realities of species competition and other elements of nature. In addition to the work of Ursula Le Guin, Nancy Kress's set of novels on the species she calls 'Vines' make a helpful contrast with the paranoia of a story such as Robert A. Heinlein's "The Puppet Masters". The 'soft' work of Le Guin and Kress will be the essay's main focus over against the tough-mindedness and 'hard' SF of Heinlein.

‘Unexpected Effects’: Marked Men in Contemporary Australian Women’s Fiction

The author critiques the ways in which a set of novels by women writers published in the period 1980-2005 represent ‘wounded men’, and analyses the challenges which such texts pose for feminist critics.

Fuentes the Modern; Fuentes the Postmodern

Since mid-1980s, numerous discussions have taken throughout Hispanic world concerning postmodernism, partly as an outgrowth of similar discussions since 1960s in United States and Europe. Increasingly, Hispanists have joined in process of postmodemizing literature written in a multiplicity of modes, including what many scholars would consider either traditional or modem. Book-length studies have appeared on topics such as Vargas Llosa among postmodems and as part of this postmodernizing process. Simultaneously, other critical studies on writings of Carlos Fuentes have identified him as a modem writer. Fuentes should be seen as a novelist (in Anglo-American use of term Modernist) who has also published a few novels with postmodern tendencies. His commitment to Modernist aesthetics can be traced back to 1950s-the period of his early fiction and his work as co- editor of Revista Mexicana de Literatura. His vast fictional project, which he identifies as La Edad del Tiempo, is grand narrative of Modernist writer par excellence. Fuentes is seen as a bridge or transitional figure between modem and postmodem, terms which should not be considered oppositional. mitten by modernity of Faulkner, Borges, Dos Passos and Kafka at an early age, Carlos Fuentes has held a lifetime commitment to Modernist literary practices.1 At same time, he has been a well-known admirer of more gestures of writers such as Calvino and Sarduy. Consequently, he is a complex and difficult subject to define-or even discuss-within context of today's ongoing debates concerning and literatures. Having published his first volume of fiction in 1954 and continuing an active program of literary creation well into twenty-first century, Fuentes's fiction spans almost fifty years. As an adolescent, he witnessed development of what many called the Mexican Miracle, what others have identified as Mexico's modernization, and what, in contrast, others have insisted on describing as Mexico's capitalist enterprise and equally failed economic modernization. Later in his career, this Mexican writer has lived in a variety of international urban settings that some considered Postmodem cultural settings, and he has also witnessed plethora of debates about of Postmodemism and culture in Latin America.2 Paradoxically, Fuentes himself has been identified as a Modem or writer by many scholars, and Postmodern by others.3 Both concepts are so laden with nuances and debates that it has been difficult to sift through and understand terms themselves, much less their potential use with respect to any contemporary writer. In this brief essay, I will attempt to make sense of some of these apparent contradictions, as well as to clarify Fuentes's relative place in these discussions of and Postmodem. I will argue that Fuentes is fundamentally a writer of Modernist impulses who has published a significant set of novels of a predominantly Modernist mode; at same time, he is author of other novels that can be identified as fiction. Fuentes-the-Modern

Brothers and Sisters in Nuruddin Farah's Two Trilogies

By JACQUELINE BARDOLPH Nuruddin Farah's two trilogies are organized on the basis of political and historical themes. The title of the first set of novels, Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship, follows the gradual disillusionment with the regime of General Siyad Barre on the part of those who had set their hopes on the new Somalia. More generally, it reflects the hopelessness a nation feels in fighting against a tyranny it has helped create, and the questions raised are broad enough to apply to other times and places. After all, at the time he was composing the opening installment of the first trilogy, Sweet and Sour Milk (1979), the author also had in mind the Greece of the Colonels. The titles of the three novels that con-

Reading the Bambata rebellion in South African English fiction

Summary The focus of this paper is a group of thirteen early novels by white writers in which the Bambata Rebellion features significantly. Discussed in turn are: (a) the novels tending to endorse white prejudice; (b) those which are ambivalent in terms of the sympathy shown to whites and blacks; and (c) those which involve some sustained questioning of white propagandist interests, and possibly even some empathy for the black cause. Underlying the study is a concern with the extent to which white South African attitudes may have shifted towards, and perhaps beyond, the more enlightened responses to the Rebellion observed in the final set of novels.

Engendering Critical Literacy through Science Fiction and Fantasy

While teaching a nine-week mini-course in science fiction and fantasy literature, I made an important discovery: this sub-genre can be used to stimulate philosophical inquiry, that is, the ability to think critically and creatively and to make connections among disciplines. My students were involved in group discussions about sets of novels arranged around various themes. In one group, two members were inviting their peers to explore metaphysical questions raised by Ursula K. Le Guin's Lathe of Heaven (1976) and Isaac Asimov's End of Eternity (1986). (The first novel focuses on a character whose dreams change reality; the second on a member of an elite order whose time-travel technology allows them to reshape the past, present, and future to their desires and purposes.) These two students, who were also taking a logic course in the math department at the time, suggested that it is impossible to distinguish between dream and reality. Provoked, another student argued that persons who are awake can feel pain while persons who are dreaming do not. Yes, but can't you think you're feeling pain in a dream? the philosophic pair retorted, dismissing this rather simplistic argument. Can't you tell the difference between being awake and asleep by violation of natural laws? I mean, if someone dreams that she is floating through the air with no support, doesn't that give us a way of seeing a difference? offered another in the group. second group was comparing and contrasting views of life after a nuclear holocaust: Alas, Babylon, Pat Frank (1976); A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller, Jr. (1976); Shikasta, Doris Lessing (1979). Their questions were interdisciplinary, moving between scientific and social issues. The thing that bothers me is that all these books think a nuclear war is survivable. I'm not sure. Could anyone really survive a nuclear winter? wondered one student aloud. A second suggested that we all should encourage politicians to freeze the production of nuclear weapons; still a third went back to Miller's novel to ask again this question: even if we survived, wouldn't we just do it again? Students in a third group were discussing the role of the hero in T. H. White's Once and Future

Cognitive complexity and affective value of literary stimuli.

31 undergraduate English students were asked to evaluate each of the 8 novels they had read on 8 bipolar adjective scales. The top four novels ranked by a student were considered to be novels with positive affect, the other four negative affect. Complexity scores were computed for the two groups of novels using the same method as scoring cognitive complexity for persons. Since it was felt that negative novels do not pose the same kind of threat as do live people, vigilance would not be as much of a factor for careful perception, and the complexity score for both sets of novels should be about the same. If justifying one's dislike for persons results in a more complex perception of these persons, a similar complex perception should be noted in responding to novels one does not like. The results showed that Ss gave more complex rating of the novels eliciting negative affect than those of positive affect, which supports justification as an explanation of complex perception of stimuli with negative affect.