Topics in Literary Criticism and Theory

3 units

This course will juxtapose a wide variety of critical approaches to literary texts to current research in the digital humanities and statistical natural language processing to ask how we can think about the complexity of literary texts in computational terms. The computational turn in literary studies emphasizes scale and a broad perspective often described as "distant reading" and implicitly contrasts this to the kind of "close reading" that has traditionally been the focus of literary scholars. However, in spite the obvious benefits of scale, such approaches tend to focus on features that are completely internal to texts or to the corpus. In this course, we will explore how we can represent ambiguities of words, nuances of structure, the interaction of motifs, and the intensely intertextual way in which most literary research problems are formulated? While we will discuss the limitations and potentials of various computational approaches, we will focus more on the possible futures of computationally assisted literary criticism than a practical survey of various tools and techniques. No prior experience with statistics or computing is required.