Well-known Text Research Articles

Contemporary British Travel Writing on Italy and British Broadsheets: Tobias Jones, John Hooper and Tim Parks

The objects of analysis here are recent, well-known texts about Italy by authors who work for broadsheet newspapers, and whose work, in turn, is promoted in those same broadsheets for a predominantly middle-class audience interested in, or most likely travelling to, Italy. The article aims to highlight the dangers of the symbiotic relationship between these texts and the British press, given that they tend to perpetuate over-simplifications and stereotypes about Italy versus Britain that have existed at least since the growth of tourism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The texts analysed here – The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones, The Italians by John Hooper and Italian Neighbours and An Italian Education by Tim Parks – were chosen due to their popularity and their authors’ visibility as commentators on Italian issues. These authors tend to display a lack of awareness of (or desire to ignore) their positioning and the ways in which their work often promotes an agenda of northern European superiority that has evolved, but not significantly altered, in the last two hundred years or so. The article reveals an unsettling alliance between these British commentators on Italy and the newspapers that are supposed to provide accurate information on, and may shape policy towards, Italy.

Beauty, Transcendence, and the Inclusive Hierarchy of Creation

Beauty, Transcendence, and the Inclusive Hierarchy of Creation1 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. Interpreters of Thomas Aquinas have long argued about whether he holds that beauty is a “transcendental,” a feature of reality coextensive with all that exists, like unity, goodness, and truthfulness.2 In the first part of this article, I will argue that Aquinas can [End Page 1215] be read to affirm in an implicit way that beauty is a transcendental. In the second part, I will consider what it might mean from a Thomistic point of view to speak of a transcendent divine beauty, given Aquinas’s metaphysical commitments, particularly with respect to his doctrine of divine simplicity. In the final part, I will treat the question of how the beauty of the creation both manifests and conceals divine beauty. Beauty as a Transcendental Feature of Reality Aquinas does not list beauty as a transcendental term in texts on transcendental notions. Perhaps, then, one should simply exclude it from a responsible account of his teaching on this subject. However, at least two well-known texts should give us reason to pause before reaching such a conclusion. One is found in his Commentary on Dionysius’ Divine Names, chapter 4, lectio 5. The other is in his discussion of the beauty of the eternal Son of God in a discussion of the Holy Trinity in the Summa theologiae I, q. 39, a. 8. In the first of these texts, Aquinas is commenting on Dionysius. The extended text is analytically dense. Aquinas is discussing ways in which one might say that God is beautiful and in what ways one might not say so. I will return to his topic below. Here, however, it is pertinent to consider Aquinas’s discussion of the presence of beauty in all that exists. He makes six main points.3 First, all beauty comes [End Page 1216] from God insofar as God is the cause of all that exists. Second, he gives a first definition of beauty: beauty can be defined ontologically as the splendor (claritas) that results from form; everything has a formal determination of some kind insofar as it has existence (esse); therefore, insofar as anything exists (and has some formal ontological content) it has some degree of beauty. Third, the splendor of the form in created things is a participation in the divine splendor from which it originates. The divine nature is the transcendent exemplar of beauty in diverse finite created realities. Fourth, then (and perhaps most importantly), “ex divina pulchritudine esse omnium derivatur”: literally, the existence of everything originates from divine beauty. Fifth, a second definition of beauty is considered: beauty can be defined ontologically as a property of being that emerges from proportion or harmony (consonantia). For example, authentic relationships of personal friendship imply spiritual harmony or concord and are beautiful and noble in this respect. Sixth, then, the concord or beautiful harmonies we find in the created order are expressive of the wisdom of God, who is the author of creation. Evidently, if the existence of everything derives from divine beauty, and if everything that has existence is in some way beautiful by virtue of its intrinsic form, then it would seem to follow logically that beauty, for Aquinas, is a characteristic of being that is coextensive with all that exists. We see a similar idea expressed in the aforementioned passage of ST. Here, however, Aquinas gives a more synthetic definition of beauty in things that combines both the definitions found in our previous discussion, claritas and proportio, but it also adds a third, integritas: ontological integrity or wholeness. Species or beauty has a likeness to the property of the Son. For beauty includes three conditions, “integrity” or “perfection,” [End Page 1217] since those things which are impaired are by the very fact ugly; due “proportion” or “harmony”; and lastly, “brightness” or “clarity,” whence things are called beautiful which have a bright color.4 The implication of this point of view is readily apparent. God is essentially beautiful, and God has created all that exists in light of the eternal Word and Wisdom of God, who is the Son. Consequently, all that exists and that...

К семантико-мотивационной реконструкции рус. диал. лутоня

The question of the origin of Russian dialect word lutonya recorded by dialectal dictionaries in several meanings related to personal characteristics of the man: ‘slow man,’ ‘scruffy man,’ ‘liar,’ ‘tall man’ is considered. The assumption of belonging of the lexeme to a derivational family of the root lut -, derivatives of which calling linden, linden bark and objects made of linden, is proved. It is noted that in the dialects the meanings of the word lutonya broadly correspond to the semantic models that are typical for synonymous lexemes, and therefore motivationally proved. However, the suffix - on - which can be found if lutonya is a derivative from the root lut -, is not found in “subject” tokens. This observation suggests an effect on the form of the word of folk etymology rapprochement with diminution name Lukyan (variant lutonya is proposed by onomasts along with Lutokha , Lutosha and othres). The author points out that the name Lutonya belongs to the character of folk tales, while there is no direct correspondence between the qualities of the character and the given dialect meanings of the lexeme lutonya . It is suggested that, at the formal level, a well-known folk text may support the functioning of the lutonya appellative.

Manifestations of the bias of an unreliable narrator in novel by V. Domontovich “Doctor Serafikus”

The results and achievements of the main schools and directions of naratology indicate the need to reread both well-known and recondite texts in order to spell out the meanings. We believe that the narrative analysis of prose by Victor Domontovich (the Ukrainian intellectual writer) is interesting and relevant. The article attempts to characterize the manifestations of the bias of an unreliable narato in the novel “Doctor Seraficus” based on the A. Nyuninga’s cognitive approach. A modern German researcher provides a set of tools that can supplemented for a multidimensional consideration of all ambiguities and contradictions in the text. An intelligent game that unfolds in the text manifests itself at different levels. V. Domontovych conducts the biggest game, the game with meaning through the pending authority of unreliable presenter. The text of the novel consists of abstract reflections, notes, dreams, illusions, fantasies, dreams and retrospective journeys. The main law of the text is the game. Irony and contradictions in the narrator’s words encourage the reader to feel dissonance, uncertainty. Therefore, in a narrative analysis, attention is focused on the speaker and who sees (the focal point). It was investigated that the artist Corvin is the narrator of the novel “Doctor Serafikus”, he tries to give as much as possible objectively the personal story. The motives for the unreliability narration based on the personal interest and bias of the character are determined. We identified the main symptoms of the unreliability of the narrator in the work, and the different levels at which the corresponding narrative is expressed, are highlighted. It is established that an unreliable narrative forces distancing itself from a narrator and takes everything that has been said with caution and detachment. Detailed narrative analysis of the work sheds light on the meanings, which for some reason masked, and allows you to establish artistic functions of an unreliable narrator. We believe that understanding this phenomenon makes it possible to make a comprehensive analysis of artistic text.

Lyrical Strategies: The Poetics of the Twentieth-Century American Novel by Katie Owens-Murphy

Reviewed by: Lyrical Strategies: The Poetics of the Twentieth-Century American Novel by Katie Owens-Murphy Elissa Zellinger OWENS-MURPHY, KATIE. Lyrical Strategies: The Poetics of the Twentieth-Century American Novel. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. 240 pp. $99.95 hardcover; $34.95 paper; $34.95 e-book. Our understanding of the American novel is poorer for our adherence to narrative theory, or so Katie Owens-Murphy argues in Lyrical Strategies: The Poetics of the Twentieth-Century American Novel. Indeed, the strictures of such theory have caused us to overlook rich generic interrelations. Critical attention to "lyricality," she contends, offers more dynamic interpretations of language and structure and, in so doing, enables "a more complete understanding of the twentieth-century American novel" (xii). In addition, this call for lyricality helps to dismantle outmoded generic barriers—barriers that ignore how "many of our most acclaimed American novels from the last century contain ontological ambiguities that undermine the traditional staples of narrative fiction" (xi). Since the conventions of narrative theory inadequately account for such ambiguities, Owens-Murphy enlists the "key tropes" (xi) of lyric—"repetition, polysyndeton, metaphor, dramatic [End Page 453] personae, and exclusive address" (xi)—as tools for providing insight into the formal maneuvers of American novels. Owens-Murphy grounds her suspicions regarding genre and theories of genre in the practices and habits of canonical twentieth-century writers. A brief "Preface" and first chapter, "Genres in Contest," outline the argument that the generic distinctions typically recognized by twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary critics—lyric, narrative, and drama—are pitted in unproductive competition with each other. Most twentieth-century writers, however, do not uphold these genre-based antagonisms. Owens-Murphy calls for scholars to re-discover "important interconnections among literary kinds" (4) by considering the lyrical practices at work in these novels. The remaining chapters in Lyrical Strategies aim to illustrate what we've been overlooking. Owens-Murphy's chapters are organized according to the lyrical tropes listed above and cover a remarkable range of twentieth-century novels. She excels at explicating novels with a reputation for difficulty. For instance, Chapter 2, "Repetition and Insistence," applies "repetition's role(s) in the lyric tradition" to works by Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, John Dos Passos, and Kathy Acker. Instead of the "progress, sequence, and succession" usually found in narrative, these authors, Owens-Murphy suggests, use lyrical repetition in order to "forc[e] the reader to look backward nearly as often as she looks forward" (44). Owens-Murphy elaborates on similar recursive reading techniques in Chapter 3, "Rhythm and Insubordination." Here she discusses polysyndeton, "the purposeful repetition of coordinating conjunctions" (47), in novels by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Don DeLillo, and Cormac McCarthy. By flattening the hierarchy of syntax in narrative, this poetic technique draws our attention to "lateral systems of interconnectivity" (55) within these texts. Owens-Murphy's next three chapters focus on broader poetic tropes. Chapter 4 discusses novels in which metaphor drives the plot; in works by Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, among others, the preeminence of metaphor results, Owens-Murphy concludes, in narratives that focus on "reflection rather than action" (86). Chapter 5 explores how the Victorian dramatic monologue creates unstable narrators in twentieth-century novels such as Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho. While providing innovative approaches to well-known texts, these last two chapters perhaps too easily ignore the ubiquity of techniques such as metaphor and too easily collapse the differences between different verse genres. These poetic techniques do not strike me as specifically lyrical: after all, all types of poetry (and prose for that matter) contain metaphor; and while dramatic monologue may have its "lyrical" moments, it is its own verse genre. Owens-Murphy returns to the conventions traditionally associated with lyric in her final chapter's discussion of the "overheard" poetic speaker. By positioning readers as "eavesdroppers" to the lyrical expression of emotions, novels such as Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint ask readers to "negotiate positions for ourselves at the margins of these confessional texts" (158). This negotiation has salutary effects, as readers potentially "suspend judgment for the sake of compassion" (185). A...

The Study of Educational Strategies for Sustainable Development Based on Insights from the Bhagavad-Gita

This paper explores educational strategies for sustainable development by following insights from Bhagavad Gita. The Bhagavad-Gita is a part of Indian epic, the Mahabharata which is a well-known Indian spiritual and philosophical text and its teachings are universal, non-sectarian.It provides educational strategies for sustainable future which aspires to increase pro-environmental behaviour. In this article, the researcher employs hermeneutics, a qualitative methodology which is the interpretation of ancient or classical literature, the Bhagavad-Gita.The existing findings are interpreted by analysing the verse of Bhagavad Gita. At the end,it is concluded that timeless teaching of Bhagavad Gita has educational strategies to enhance the sustainable development .This article is expected to provide spiritual as well as philosophical approach to education for sustainable development based on spiritual insights from Bhagavad Gita.

Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams by Irina Paperno (review)

SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 742 did not merely use the novel as the site for the illustration of a philosophical doctrine on time but for the very experimentation of the doctrine. ‘Ada is not a late modernist monument at all but a novel about modernism, underscoring thereby the distance between its author and literary precursors’ (p. 158). The conclusion goes beyond Ada, extending to our contemporary literary landscape, for in the conclusion of her study, ‘World Literature and the Butterfly Man’ (pp. 159–69), Bozovic focuses on those she calls ‘the children of Nabokov’, that is a new generation of writers, such as Azar Nafisi, Orhan Pamuk and W. G. Sebald, to emphasize the long-lasting success of Nabokov’s enterprise in reshaping the literary landscape. Nabokov, she writes, ‘managed not only to escape marginalization himself, but through his literary output and lifelong aesthetic propaganda campaign, to reconfigure the international cultural playing field’ (p. 165). Bozovic’s study is remarkable in many ways, because it sets out to theorize with utmost clarity the unique place of Nabokov in worldwide literature, a place that he consciously forged himself, while accounting at the same time for the diversity of his literary descendants. Although Bozovic never loses track of her forceful idea, always pulling back to her main issues, she nourishes her notional points with precise and nuanced microanalyses of Nabokov’s texts. In the sea of intertextual speculations that Nabokov’s entire work calls forth, Bozovic helps us recontextualize the work of Nabokov and make sense of the nature of his bibliophilic experiments. Université de Cergy-Pontoise Y. Chupin Paperno, Irina. Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2009. xv + 285 pp. Notes. Appendices. Index. $25.50: £21.95 (paperback). This excellent study makes for accessible reading without sacrificing intellectual sophistication. Irina Paperno’s focus is the published personal accounts of life in the Soviet Union which proliferated in the late 1980s to early 2000s, and her overarching theme is the disjunctive experience of the Soviet intelligentsia. Part One provides an interpretive overview of the substantial corpus, which comprises over 200 memoirs and diaries. For Paperno, the trend uniting these diverse texts (which are often overlapping, mutually reinforcing, or contradictory) is the way in which they articulate the ‘catastrophic quality of personal experience’, making ‘individual lives part of the history that has come to a close’ (p. xi). This is not merely about understanding the past: Paperno argues that these accounts all manifest the same aspiration to ‘turn intimate REVIEWS 743 life under Soviet conditions into a shared open space’ (p. 8), making the private public, and thereby ‘realigning selves and communities’ (p. 56). Part Two provides close readings of Lidiia Chukovskaia’s diaries about Anna Akhmatova and the autobiographical notebooks of an uneducated pensioner from Ukraine, Evgeniia Kiseleva. Chukovskaia’s journals initially seem too obvious a choice — they have received extensive treatment from scholars, including Beth Holmgren in Women’s Works in Stalin’s Time (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, 1996). Some of Paperno’s insights could productively have been developed through more explicit dialogue with these existing sources. For instance, she remarks that Akhmatova’s rejections of official offers of improvements to her living situation were consistent with the intelligentsia’s moral valorization of poverty, so that her ‘carefully cultivated posture involved principled rejection of domesticity and comfort’ (p. 84), an observation which could have been nuanced through reference to Galina Rylkova’s discussion of the effects of Akhmatova’s immediate surroundings on her creativity in The Archaeology of Anxiety (Pittsburgh, PA, 2007). Nonetheless, what distinguishes Paperno’s analysis is her original approach to a well-known text. While acknowledging the mythopoetic and biographical significance of Chukovskaia’s diaries for Akhmatova, Paperno emphasizes their broader ‘ethnographic value’ (p. 60), examining them for what they reveal about the rituals, customs and behaviour of the literary intelligentsia in the Soviet era. Her discussion is detailed, perceptive and engaging, and her ‘ethnographic’ approach proves a fruitful reading methodology. The inclusion of the memoir by Kiseleva, conversely, appears somewhat counter-intuitive. The text — which describes its author’s experiences of war, marriage,infidelity,domestic abuse,complex...

Unknown Hungarian first fruits of the Slovak poet Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav

The Slovak (as well as non-national) history of literature, dedicated to heuristic research and gradual archival and interpretive disclosure of both well-known and unknown texts of the Slovak poet P. O. Hviezdoslav, followed up in its early stages the interest of the Czech literary historian, Albert Pražak, who in his biographical memoir publication S Hviezdoslavom (With Hviezdoslav) offered a portrait of that poet on the basis of the authentic manuscript material and recollections. The discovery of P. O. Hviezdoslav’s early Hungarian poetic composition of approximately 500 verses entitled Tompakő comes from that part of the Slovacica estate from Albert Pražak that was not passed over in the 1950s to the editors of the poet’s works in Slovakia, followed by the archival processing and keeping in the Literary Archives of the Matica slovenska national foundation. In the volume of poems Tompakő, originating in the first half of the 1860s, the poet presented some of the Orava region themes, which reflected his close links with the nature. In this paper, we will focus on the interpretation of a literary historical and comparative grasp of Hviezdoslav’s newly discovered manuscripts of Hungarian poems. Of course, we are aware that this unexpected discovery of the Hungarian first fruits of Hviezdoslav will not principally alter the picture of the poet’s early work, but in addition to its very heuristic-biographical value, it will expand the view of both Slovak and Hungarian literary history on the thematic and genre variability of Hviezdoslav’s early work.

Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of PoeNovel Nostalgias: The Aesthetics of Antagonism in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature

Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of PoeNovel Nostalgias: The Aesthetics of Antagonism in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature

Carmelo Bene’s cannibalization of Dante and Shakespeare

Carmelo Bene’s theatrical performances of classics such as Shakespeare were aimed at deconstructing these well-known texts in order to dismantle the straightjacket of their eternal, unchanging quality. This procedure allowed Bene to provide new ‘readings’ of Shakespeare as well as unexpected associations with the works of other poets and playwrights. In the case of his film version of Othello (1979), Bene seems to accentuate a surprising cannibalistic undercurrent in the original, through textual, visual and oral emphases and small but significant translational changes. Bene’s performance of Othello is interestingly echoed by his rendition of Canto XXXIII of Dante’s Inferno (1981). His cannibalistic reinterpretation (in form as well as in content, which means that he singles out possible clues to cannibalism in both cases and he does so by ‘cannibalizing’ the texts) of the tales of Othello and Ugolino suggests surprising parallels between these characters and their respective destinies.

A LANGUAGE GAME WITH PRECEDENT PHENOMENA

This paper is devoted to a language game with precedent phenomena. By precedent phenomena the authors mean well-known texts, easily recognized and reproduced in the minds of native speakers. This paper describes precedent phenomena of a phraseological level such as set expressions, idioms, proverbs. These elements are often transformed to draw the addressee’s attention and serve as the basis for creating a language game. A language game refers to the intentional breach of habitual use of words and set expressions which demonstrates the author’s creative ability to deviate from the normative and stereotypical use. The purpose of this deviation is to express the additional denotative and connotative meanings. The materials of the research include texts of modern fictional prose, mass media and advertisements. The methods of contextual, semantic and structural analysis were used to discover the types of precedent phenomena transformation. The main types of precedent phenomena transformations include the following: 1) change of size of a precedent phenomenon; 2) change of structure of a precedent phenomenon; 3) formation based on an analogy, according to a commonly known model; 4) transformation of elements of set expressions without replacing them; 5) transformation of meaning based on polysemy and homonymy of elements. The given types of transformation specify and specialize semantically the original set expressions, proverbs, phraseological units to fit them into a certain situation. It is the author’s individual interpretation that the transformed set expressions, phraseological units and proverbs acquire emotional-evaluative connotations, produce additional influence effects on the reader and convey a wide range of emotions.

Mqhayi's chapter and verse: Kees van die Kalahari becoming u-Adonisi wasentlango

Xhosa’s best and most well-known imbongi and poet, S. E. K. Mqhayi, once translated an Afrikaans book Kees van die Kalahari into Xhosa—a story about the trials and tribulations of a leader baboon and his tribe. The Xhosa translation had been prescribed for generations of pupils and became one of the language’s most well-known texts. As part of a larger project which will compare the two texts in their totality, this essay is a preliminary exercise to determine the history of the translated text and more specifically to explore what Mqhayi’s possible translation strategies could have been which rendered the book so ‘home- grown’. According to Sindiwe Magona, ‘It was prescribed to me in high school and I taught it, but neither I, nor my colleagues, realised that it was a translation. And even now, there is no feeling that behind this text there is another one, it feels so authentic!’ There are in fact two other texts: the original English text which spawned the well-known Afrikaans book Kees van die Kalahari, written/translated by the brothers S. B. and G. C. Hobson. The Afrikaans text won the coveted Afrikaans Hertzog Prize for prose and was reprinted 33 times.

Psycholingwistyczny portret sprawcy przestępstw. Wstęp do dyskusji

Artykuł dotyczy jednego z aspektów lingwistyki kryminalistycznej, tj. ustalania autorstwa kwestionowanych wypowiedzi. Odbywa się to przy współpracy lingwisty – tworzącego profil lingwistyczny autora tekstów – i psychologa – który tworzy profil psychologiczny. Współpraca specjalistów może być wykorzystana na płaszczyźnie opiniowania wykorzystywanego dla celów śledczych oraz sądowych. Ekspertyzy z zakresu lingwistyki kryminalistycznej (forensic linguistics, niem. forensische Linguistik) obejmują: ustalanie autorstwa/wykonawstwa wypowiedzi na podstawie treści mówionej lub pisanej (np. listów pożegnalnych, listów z pogróżkami, żądań okupu), możliwość ustalania autorstwa anonimowych tekstów w Internecie, ustalenie cech językowych stalkerów i cyberstalkerów, które mogą zidentyfikować nadawcę komunikatu ze względu na kraj pochodzenia, konstruowanie profilu językowego autora anonimów, profilu lingwistycznego autora znanego tekstu. Dodać należy, iż analiza zawartości treściowo-językowej dokumentów zawiera składnik emocjonalny, co wiąże się z posiadaną wiedzą na temat językowych uwarunkowań wyrażania emocji, zarówno negatywnych, jak i pozytywnych. Istotnym elementem tekstu jest kwestia portretu psychologicznego nadawcy (autora i/lub wykonawcy) tekstu na podstawie zidentyfikowanych cech językowych.

Ordinal-based and frequency-based integration of feature selection methods for sentiment analysis

Feature subset selection with the aim of reducing dependency of feature selection techniques and obtaining a high-quality minimal feature subset from a real-world domain is the main task of this research. For this end, firstly, two types of feature representation are presented for feature sets, namely unigram-based and part-of-speech based feature sets. Secondly, five methods of feature ranking are employed for creating feature vectors. Finally, we propose two methods for the integration feature vectors and feature subsets. An ordinal-based integration of different feature vectors (OIFV) is proposed in order to obtain a new feature vector. The new feature vector depends on the order of features in the old vectors. A frequency-based integration of different feature subsets (FIFS) with most effective features, which are obtained from a hybrid filter and wrapper methods in the feature selection task, is then proposed. In addition, four well-known text classification algorithms are employed as classifiers in the wrapper method for the selection of the feature subsets. A wide range of comparative experiments on five widely-used datasets in sentiment analysis were carried out. The experiments demonstrate that proposed methods can effectively improve the performance of sentiment classification. These results also show that proposed part-of-speech patterns are more effective in their classification accuracy compared to unigram-based features.

Feature selection based on a normalized difference measure for text classification

The goal of feature selection in text classification is to choose highly distinguishing features for improving the performance of a classifier. The well-known text classification feature selection metric named balanced accuracy measure (ACC2) (Forman, 2003) evaluates a term by taking the difference of its document frequency in the positive class (also known as true positives) and its document frequency in the negative class (also known as false positives). This however results in assigning equal ranks to terms having equal difference, ignoring their relative document frequencies in the classes. In this paper we propose a new feature ranking (FR) metric, called normalized difference measure (NDM), which takes into account the relative document frequencies. The performance of NDM is investigated against seven well known feature ranking metrics including odds ratio (OR), chi squared (CHI), information gain (IG), distinguishing feature selector (DFS), gini index (GINI) ,balanced accuracy measure (ACC2) and Poisson ratio (POIS) on seven datasets namely WebACE(WAP,K1a,K1b), Reuters (RE0, RE1),spam email dataset and 20 newsgroups using the multinomial naive Bayes (MNB) and supports vector machines (SVM) classifiers. Our results show that the NDM metric outperforms the seven metrics in 66% cases in terms of macro-F1 measure and in 51% cases in terms of micro F1 measure in our experimental trials on these datasets.

La funzione della parodia nelle riscritture di Carmelo Bene

Parody is a fundamental tool in Carmelo Bene’s rewritings. This paper investigates the forms of parody used by the author in order to understand their functions. It focuses particularly on the discrepancies between Bene’s love for tragedy and the cruel aggression that he inflicts on this genre. The main tools of my analysis consist in a close study of Bene’s works, with a constant eye on the (sometimes contradictory) purposes of the author’s artistic philosophy, and with specific attention to both the theoretical sources known by Bene and some cornerstones in literary genres studies. The analysis reveals two main functions of parody. First, Bene uses parody in order to neutralize the received ways of enjoyment of a well-known text. In Bene’s intentions, this allows the public who watches the show to establish anew an emotional involvement, which would otherwise be jeopardized due to the audience’s familiarity with the text. Secondly, through the use of parody a new sense of tragedy emerges. Although absent in the original works, this novel tragic condition envisioned by Bene better fits the essence of contemporary man: an individual paralyzed by a feeling of apathy who believes (s)he lives in a senseless world while waiting for an end that never comes.

Terms-based discriminative information space for robust text classification

With the popularity of Web 2.0, there has been a phenomenal increase in the utility of text classification in applications like document filtering and sentiment categorization. Many of these applications demand that the classification method be efficient and robust, yet produce accurate categorizations by using the terms in the documents only. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient method using terms-based discriminative information space for robust text classification. Terms in the documents are assigned weights according to the discrimination information they provide for one category over the others. These weights also serve to partition the terms into category sets. A linear opinion pool is adopted for combining the discrimination information provided by each set of terms to yield a feature space (discriminative information space) having dimensions equal to the number of classes. Subsequently, a discriminant function is learned to categorize the documents in the feature space. This classification methodology relies upon corpus information only, and is robust to distribution shifts and noise. We develop theoretical parallels of our methodology with generative, discriminative, and hybrid classifiers. We evaluate our methodology extensively with five different discriminative term weighting schemes on six data sets from different application areas. We give a side-by-side comparison with four well-known text classification techniques. The results show that our methodology consistently outperforms the rest, especially when there is a distribution shift from training to test sets. Moreover, our methodology is simple and effective for different application domains and training set sizes. It is also fast with a small and tunable memory footprint.

A Companion to Alain Chartier (c. 1385–1430): Father of French Eloquence. Edited by Daisy Delogu, Joan E. McRae, and Emma Cayley.

This excellent volume — the medieval author’s first ‘Companion’ — consolidates the increasing critical attention directed to Alain Chartier over the past decade, its essays collectively making a persuasive case for him as ‘the most widely influential European writer of the fifteenth century’ (p. 279). Fourteen chapters are divided between four parts, locating Chartier in relation to his cultural, literary, and material context (Part One); proposing a range of approaches to his work (Part Two); focusing on the idea of ‘textual communities’ as a conceptual principle of both authorship and reception (Part Three); and mapping the cultural and chronological reach of his influence (Part Four). An important shared objective of the contributions is to promote the permeability of category boundaries that have previously operated in Chartier scholarship — between his professional identities as writer and diplomat, between his prose and verse compositions, and between Latin and vernacular works in his œuvre. This objective is pursued effectively through the practice of revisiting works in several chapters across the book, which elaborates in different contexts the cultural significance of well-known texts, such as the Belle Dame sans mercy , as well as drawing attention to important, less appreciated pieces, like Le Livre des quatre dames . The chapters themselves constitute a satisfying combination of synthesizing essays (such as the elegant overview of Chartier’s œuvre furnished by James Laidlaw, or Camille Serchuk’s examination of all thirty-two illuminated manuscripts) and critical analyses (Andrea Tarnowski’s study of the persona as a figure apart, or Daisy Delogu’s performative approach to gender roles). They are uniformly engaging and lucid, and strike a commendable balance between accessibility to the less familiar reader (the volume could readily be recommended on undergraduate reading lists, for example) and stimulating interest for the more specialist scholar. Of particular note is the collection’s very successful realization of its aim to offer Chartier’s texts as ‘a point of entry into larger questions’ (p. 11): the essays not only augment and richly contextualize our specific understanding of the writer — exploring the role of poet as public servant that he pioneered (Adrian Armstrong) or establishing his significance in medieval debates about chivalry (Craig Taylor); they also deploy Chartier to map key concerns of late medieval literary culture, furthering our appreciation of the early printed-book marketplace (Olivia Robinson), or of the power of poetry to effect political and social change during the Hundred Years’ War (Deborah McGrady). In this respect, the volume is of great value to scholars of the later Middle Ages more broadly, a value that could only be enhanced by an increased use of cross-referencing between chapters, to aid the reader approaching its essays selectively rather than sequentially — this would be especially helpful, for instance, between synthesizing chapters on influence in Part Four and earlier contributions on context in Part One. In sum, this collection is an exemplary piece of ‘Companion’ scholarship, which establishes emphatically Chartier’s importance in medieval French studies and beyond.

Smyrniw, Walter Ukrainian Science Fiction: Historical and Thematic Perspectives (review)

SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 518 Smyrniw, Walter. Ukrainian Science Fiction: Historical and Thematic Perspectives. Peter Lang, Bern, 2013. 388 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Selective chronological bibliography. Index. €82.00: £61.00 (paperback). Walter Smyrniw’s monograph makes the case for Ukrainian science fiction as a culturally distinct branch of the international sci-fi family. Despite taking as his epigraph Einstein’s remark that ‘imagination embraces the entire world’, Smyrniw’s parameters are more cautious. Rather than an exhaustive history, he aims at outlining ‘the representative and the most imaginative Ukrainian science fiction [...] by writers residing in Ukraine and abroad’ (p. 9). After warning that ‘there is no single, viable definition of science fiction’, Smyrniw opens with a history of the genre worldwide. Unusually and intriguingly, he neglects well-known texts for obscurer works which were ‘firsts’ in their field, like Bishop Godwin’s 1638 The Man in the Moone (the first off-world utopia), or Denis Vairasse’s 1679 Histoire des Sévarambes (the first utopia set in Australia). In later chapters, Smyrniw locates other such ‘firsts’ in Ukrainian fiction — Vasyl Berezhnyi’s novella about an alien base discovered on the Moon is described as a ‘great leap forward for Soviet Ukrainian science fiction’ (p. 176); given the context, one wonders whether it might have been a ‘giant leap’ for Ukrainian novelists, too. Smyrniw relies on writers — such as Kingsley Amis and Ray Bradbury — rather than academics for theoretical commentary, ignoring Fredric Jameson and barely citing Darko Suvin. Each of the eighteen chapters explores a particular theme of twentieth-century Ukrainian scientific fantasy, including utopias; aliens; robots, androids and cyborgs (painstakingly differentiated and separately discussed); space travel; and technology. We gradually realize — though never explicitly told — that by Ukrainian science fiction Smyrniw means science fiction in the Ukrainian language. Ukrainian-born authors writing in Russian need not apply. This excludes Mikhail Bulgakov (The Fatal Eggs or Adam and Eve); Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii’s odd dystopian fantasies; and, very disappointingly, mainstream science fiction writers such as the great (and comparatively widely translated) Anatolii Dneprov. In his keenness to refute what he calls the ‘myopic perception’ (p. 111) abroad of Ukrainian science fiction as an offshoot of Soviet writings, Smyrniw ruthlessly excludes other Russian influences, echoes and encounters. Concepts widespread in modern Slavic culture, such as Solov´ev’s man-godhood, Vernadskii’s noosphere or Federov’s ideas about immortality and resurrection, inevitably emerge in the texts discussed. By failing to credit their Russian origins, this book misses an opportunity to compare the common sources of Russian and Ukrainian imagination. Smyrniw’s determined exclusion of Russian authors clashes with his marked openness to Western influences on his field, by authors like H. G. Wells, Karel Čapek, Jules REVIEWS 519 Verne or Percival Lowell (the man behind the myth of Martian canals). Yet it feels like a major concession when Smyrniw mentions Ivan Efremov’s hugely influential novel Andromeda Nebula (and only because it is referenced by an Oles’ Berdnyk character). Conversely, Smyrniw is at his best discussing the stifling of Ukrainian writers by Soviet ideology and censorship. Chapter seven compares two space travel novels from the early 1930s, one by the pro-Soviet Volodymyr Vladko (Argonauts of the Universe), the other by the Catholic writer Myroslav Kapii (The Land of Blue Orchids), in a convincing case study of narrative deformed by ideology. Kapii’s Mars mission boasts an international crew, a Ukrainian astronomer, and a landing site near Kiev, whereas Vladko’s Venusian expedition ignores or belittles any characters (including Venusians) who are neither Soviet nor Russian. Vladko’s novel appeared in several editions and languages; Kapii’s simply lapsed into obscurity. Smyrniw stresses such continuity gaps in Ukrainian science fiction, where later authors like Berdnyk or Berezhnyi fail to recognize or benefit from the influence of predecessors like Kapii (apparently, ‘the progenitor of space voyages in Ukrainian science fiction’, p.123) because their work remained unavailable or unknown. He is particularly keen to dethrone writers like Vladko or Iurii Smolych (‘almost invariably hailed as the patriarch of Ukrainian science fiction’, p. 135) who owe their legacy to popularity with Soviet critics and over-representation in Russian translation. Smyrniw corrects the record by...

Sir Ivor Jennings’ ‘The Conversion of History into Law’

2015 saw the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta. Beyond Britain, especially in the phase of decolonisation and state-building, the Magna Carta, British institutions and laws spread across the globe. As Linda Colley has recently observed, ‘Although Britain has no written constitution, British lawyers, civil servants, and diplomats have been conspicuously active in writing constitutions for other countries’.1 Arguably the most important British figure in this process during the 20th century was Sir Ivor Jennings. One of Britain’s most prolific and prominent constitutional scholars, Jennings was the driving force behind this process. Aside from being the author of well-known texts including The Law and the Constitution , Cabinet Government , Parliament , and The Approach to Self-Government (all still in print) and a distinguished Cambridge Don, Jennings was also highly influential as a constitutional adviser across the world. In particular he had a substantial influence on constitutions in the ‘New Commonwealth’ from the late 1930s till the 1960s, and his advice was sought throughout the Commonwealth and the United Kingdom when it came to constitutional matters. Jennings has been credited by legal scholars, like Martin Loughlin, with being one of the founders of the ‘functionalist’ method in public law.2 This approach sees the analysis of politics and state institutions as central to the study of public law. The arguments below, delivered from a lecture given on 16 March 1960 to an unknown audience, detail a further strand of the functionalist thought by showing how Jennings saw the British common law tradition as one of converting history into law. His paper articulates and ultimately argues the wisdom and pragmatic superiority of the British concept of parliamentary sovereignty where the legislature is infused with both historical precedent and contextual need in determining the constitutional order …