Abstracts

In his plenary, Alessandro Berselli will talk about writing as a narrative but also as an emotional experience, analysed along the following didactic threads:
- constructing the story: the start, development, the acme, the resolution
- working on the character and the character’s role in the economy of the story
- interior monologue as a phase of experience and confrontation/analysis with one’ own ego: the narrative becoming the mirror of oneself and an expedient for narrating oneself
- the importance of the dialogue; how to give voice to the characters; when the writer steps aside and lets his characters speak
- the style becoming seduction, the word beyond mere semantic meaning and its aesthetic value
- the novel as social analysis
- narrative and pedagogy: is the novelist’s task just to tell the story or also to teach and provide answers?

The foundational idea of stylometry is that the textual fingerprints of a specific author’s style can be traced back to a number of very distinctive words in their writing. Many different approaches have been proposed in the literature to properly count these terms in a meaningful way. While a few commonly used techniques may provide intuitive explanations, it is not always the case, as some of the most relevant features to distinguish between classes might be just sets of characters (n-grams). In recent times, more sophisticated methods have been studied to foster the effectiveness of stylometry and other literary classification endeavors. Unfortunately, as these techniques borrow more and more from natural language processing, it is becoming harder for practitioners to stay up-to-date, apply them successfully, or even understand how and why they work. In this talk, I will give an overview of how statistical pre-trained language models are built and how they can be effectively put to use within literary and poetry studies.

Style is primarily about courage, as the most daring act in life and writing is to make a choice. During their careers, writers constantly commit to expressive research. In this sense, autobiography, i.e. the complete or partial story of oneself, shows the multiple point of views from which the ego can be observed. J. M. Coetzee told the story of his life in the third person, imagining he was dead while a stranger interviewed men and women of his past; Paul Auster faced the absolute truth of the body. In November 1996, Murakami Haruki was invited to participate in a workshop at the University of Tōkyō and he was asked what he would write on a three-page CV to be sent to a company for hiring, he replied: talk about fried oysters. According to the Japanese author, focusing on something that he loved, whatever that was, would have been much more effective than writing anything general and indefinite about himself. Balancing feeling and detachment defines the voice of the writer, who has to deal with the risks and potential of errant concepts such as coherence and repetition. However, style also includes the characteristics of a lived life that precedes and runs parallel to the writing itself: it is the writer’s trade taking form. By looking at style from this point of view, we understand how, from Anton Čechov to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, from Primo Levi to Bruce Chatwin, their previous or concurrent trade left a deep impression on their language as well as often visible fingerprints on their style. Style and content are indistinguishable. While considering Raymond Queneau's Exercises of Style, Umberto Eco wrote that the first take-home message of the Exercises is that the line dividing figures of expression and figures of content is blurred and because of that, choosing a style becomes a crucial operation. All in all, choosing a style means, firstly, choosing the lens through which one observes the world, and then it also means deciding on the content. That lens is Dippold's, the Optician in the Anthology of Spoon River by E. L. Masters: during that high-paced dialogue between him and a customer, he asks the customer what he sees while testing different lenses. The search for expressivity, and thus style, will only stop when the writer finds a lens that captures “light, just light, making everything below it a toy world". That will be the writer's view of the world and the style to write about it.

In this session, I will introduce the web application CLiC (Corpus Linguistics in Context), I will illustrate its use with a number of examples, and I will discuss wider implications for the study of literary texts. CLiC has been developed for the analysis of narrative fiction. It draws on methods from corpus linguistics and tailors them to the analysis of fiction. The CLiC corpora contain 154 texts and over 16 million words across five subcorpora: including Dickens’s novels, children’s fiction and the African American Writers corpus. For all CLiC texts, direct speech and specific places around speech have been marked up (Mahlberg et al. 2021). Hence, CLiC can run searches across defined textual subsets. In this way, it enables the analysis of specific features of narrative fiction. The CLiC Tagger is now available as a stand-alone tool, too, and I will show how researchers can use it to mark-up their own corpora. The study of fiction is an important area to bring corpus linguistics and digital humanities more closely together. In this session, I will also look at future opportunities in this space.

Suggested reading

Mahlberg, M., & Wiegand V. (2022). Exploring narrative fiction: corpora and digital humanities projects. In A. O’Keeffe & M. McCarthy (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.

Egbert, J. & Mahlberg, M. (2020). Fiction – one register or two? Speech and narration in novels. Register Studies, 2(1), 72-101. https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.19006.egb

Mahlberg, M. and Wiegand, V. (2020). Stylistics and the digital humanities. In Conrad, S., Hartig, A., L. Santelmann (eds.) The Cambridge Introduction to Applied Linguistics, (pp. 219-234), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mahlberg, M., Stockwell, P., Wiegand, V. and Lentin, J. 2020. CLiC 2.1. Corpus Linguistics in Context. https://clic.bham.ac.uk/

Mastropierro, L. & Mahlberg, M., (2017). Key words and translated cohesion - A corpus stylistic analysis of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and its Italian translation, English Text Construction. 10 (1), 78-105. https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.10.1.05mas

Literary translating may be understood very broadly as translating activity during which a text (of any type) for translation is approached with close attention to its stylistic properties and those of its impending translation. The stylistic properties of a text result from choices that both writer and translator face, and make, at every keystroke; but whereas (simplifying somewhat), we may assume that writers have fairly free choice in what they write, translators are constrained to at least some degree by the text they are translating. In the Translation Studies literature, this is often conceived of as a source of problems for translators, and it raises issues about the relationship between the style of the source text and the style of the target text; and about the style of the author and the style of the translator. I will argue, however, that rather than viewing the issue of choice as problematic, we view it as an invitation for translators to exercise creativity in their choices. With reference to relevant, illustrative examples, I will suggest where translators might look for guidance in doing so, all the while acknowledging the role played in the process by what Kant (1790) referred to as “genius” (something which Kant would, however, not have attributed to the translating activity).

Reference
Kant, Immanuel. 1790/1951. Critique of Judgement. New York: Hafner Publishing, translated by J. H. Bernard from 1790 Kritik der Urteilskraft. Berlin and Libau: ban Lagarde and Friederich.

Some 46 years ago, André Lefevere – in an echo of John Dryden’s tripartite classification of translation approaches into Metaphrase, Paraphrase and Imitation – wrote that “the translator, as opposed to the version writer and the imitator, should possess the ability to re-interpret the source text along the lines of the interpretation laid down by the original author” (1975:392). Lefevere was writing after major twentieth-century developments in literary theory – notably Wimsatt and Beardsley’s notion of the intentional fallacy and Barthes’ announcement of the death of the author – that saw the power dynamic in literary encounters shift from author to reader. There is, however, no indication in his statement that this shift has taken place, and he leaves no space for translational creativity untrammelled by authorial authority. This disconnect between literary theory and translation studies is an ongoing problem both for the practice of translation and the scholarly study thereof. Freedoms that readers have long since been accorded – the freedom to interpret, to recontextualise, to read politically, to cognitively and creatively co-construct – all too often still require justification in the world of translation practice. The endless re-rehearsal of tired “invariant” tropes provokes polemical responses, at the root of which lies frustration (cf. Lawrence Venuti’s Beyond Instrumentalism).
This lecture will take as its starting point the incontrovertible fact that translation is creative. It will review recent impulses in Anglophone Translation Studies that reinforce and promote the fact of translation’s creativity and look at how practitioners in the English-speaking world are opening up the practice – and its indisputable creativity – for greater public appreciation.