Posts filed under 'literary criticism'
While reading Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, it occurred to me that the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive should do the same within itself. The first step this Winter will be to complete a major information overhaul, marking up and encoding all passages and images rigorously in XML. Then, dynamic real-time visual tools can be used to illuminate the Recherche, narrative, and the manner in which archive users have been interacting with the novel.
Moretti’s use of graphs to illustrate the publishing data about the novel in different times and locations throughout history shows fascinating patterns about its system of subgenres, its rises and falls, and the relationships it bears with politics and economics. Such models could be applied to the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive, but for purpose of illuminating its internal relationships. Graphs could be used to show various aspects of the church motif and how they are patterned throughout the work. Would, say, the rises and falls of particular associations tell us anything about the novel’s exploration of memory or subjectivity, especially anything that might not be obvious in Proust scholarship hitherto? If so, what do these patterns tell us about narrative itself, and of the motif as an element of narrative?
The mapping techniques that Moretti applies to certain English novels reveal interesting patterns in their plot elements, such as the consistency in which certain types of plots form distinct rings around the geographical center of the action. What would we learn from maps of churches in the Recherche, and how they relate to its exploration of subjective memory, national memory, local memory, memorialization through architecture, archives, and narrative? Would the regions of France, their churches, and how the churches signify within the narrative tell us anything new about the Recherche?
Perhaps even trees dealing with associations, categories, or motifs could tell us a lot about the church motif and its operation within the whole narrative.
As well, these kinds of tools could be used to illuminate the relationships between critical discussion on the blog and the text and images in the archive. Which passages get the most attention? The least? Which associations and image properties are most or least discussed? How do these change over time?
A unified, dynamic, and interactive visualization section of the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive could potentially show so much about the Recherche and narrative that has not yet been seen. It could prove to be a new method of inquiry into the novel, Proust, narrative, literary scholarship, and more.
Here are some basic relationships that a visualization application could explore:
Graphs
- Association by pagination location in the novel.
- Association by chronological location in the narrative.
- Association by chronology of composition (would require extensive textual scholarship).
- Association by church.
- Blog categories by association, and/or by image property, and/or by church.
- Real, fictional, and hybrid churches by location in the novel, in the narrative, by image type, etc.
Maps
- Geographical locations of churches.
- Geographical locations of associations and churches.
- Geographical locations of associations by churches, broken down by real, fictional, and hybrid churches.
- Character by geographical location, church, associations, and image properties.
- Any of the above by critical categories in the blog.
Trees
- Breakdown schema of how real and hybrid churches are used in particular associations (say, romantic love or the subject/object distinction).
- Schema of how blog categories explore certain associations or image properties.
- Schema of an image property and the kinds of associations it tends to appear with.
As a note for a future post, in order to make the data more effective in visual applications, a rigorous categorization of the associations (which are non-categorized) will probably be necessary.
November 17th, 2008
(Continued from this post and this post.)
This project began as a spreadsheet documenting the church passages for a term paper in a Proust seminar. It was subsequently compared by someone else in a textual scholarship seminar to Roland Barthes’ S/Z. The comparison holds on two counts: the arranging of passages in a cross-referenced grid system and the inclusion of interpretive keys as paratexts.
Barthes’ method in S/Z, a narratological analysis of Balzac’s novella Sarrasine, breaks down the entire story into passages (which he calls “lexia”), beneath which appear his analyses according to five semiotic codes: the hermeneutic (HER), semantic (SEM), symbolic (SYM), proairetic [or actional] (ACT), and referential (REF). This enables him to perform a step-by-step reading that remains attentive to the plural of the text. This method,
through its very slowness and dispersion, avoids penetrating, reversing the tutor text, giving an internal image of it: it is never anything but the decomposition (in the cinematographic sense) of the work of reading: a slow motion, so to speak, neither wholly image nor wholly analysis; it is, finally, in the very writing of the commentary, a systematic use of digression (a form ill-accommodated by the discourse of knowledge) and thereby a way of observing the reversibility of the structures from which the text is woven; of course, the classic text is incompletely reversible (it is modestly plural): the reading of this text occurs within a necessary order, which the gradual analysis will make precisely its order of writing; but the step-by-step commentary is of necessity a renewal of the entrances to the text, it avoids structuring the text excessively, avoids giving it that additional structure which would come from a dissertation and would close it: it stars the text, instead of assembling it. (12-13; Barthes’ emphases)
To a contemporary reader, Barthes’ digressions take a form remarkably similar to blog posts with category tags and commentary. Each segment of the book is anywhere from one to about five pages in length and begins with a number, a title, a passage from Sarrasine, and then commentary that incorporates any of the five semiotic codes that might be present. And they progress rigidly in chronological order according to the tutor text — as we sometimes say of the seriality of blogs under the “tyranny of the timestamp” (but which can be “adjusted”). He uses the codes as a system for both teasing out the plural of the tutor text in the act of reading and for referring to other passages containing the same types of signifiers, which is like tagging in Web 2.0.
One of the true innovations of Barthes’ approach in S/Z is the simplicity of the overall structure. In using only the basic procedures of analysis, labeling, and cross-reference, without the inhibiting burden of organizing them around large themes or an articulation of the whole text, he is able to use the digressive episodes to mine each lexia for its plurality. Each segment becomes a self-contained discourse on the lexia it falls under, making connections as it pleases. Or as he says:
If we want to remain attentive to the plural of the text (however limited it may be), we must renounce structuring this text in large masses, as was done by classical rhetoric and by secondary-school education: no construction of the text: everything signifies ceaselessly and several times, but without being delegated to a great final ensemble, to an ultimate structure. Whence the idea, and so to speak the necessity, of a gradual analysis of a single text. Whence, it would seem, several implications and several advantages. The commentary on a single text is not a contingent activity, assigned the reassuring alibi of the “concrete”: the single text is valid for all the texts of literature, not in that it represents them (abstracts and equalizes them), but in that literature itself is never anything but a single text: the one text is not an (inductive) access to a Model, but entrance into a network with a thousand entrances; to take this entrance is to aim, ultimately, not at a legal structure of norms and departures, a narrative or poetic Law, but at a perspective (of fragments, of voices from other texts, other codes), whose vanishing point is nonetheless ceaselsessly pushed back, mysteriously opened: each (single) text is the very theory (and not the mere example) of this vanishing, of this difference which indefinitely returns, insubmissive. (11-12; Barthes’ emphasis)
The notion of Literature as a single hypertext of voices, “a network with a thousand entrances,” is where the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive begins its own construction (though I hadn’t studied S/Z until long after the search engine was built). It singles out one strain of the narrative in order to examine up close the multiple voices and “entrances” and “vanishing points” of the Recherche. The purpose is to read Proust in a way that hasn’t been done before, and also to further the study of narrative by using new tools (search engine, blog, taxonomic and folksonomic organization, hypertext) that were foreshadowed but unavailable to narratologists during the 1970s:
to take up the structural analysis of narrative where it has been left till now: at the major structures; it is to assume the power (the time, the elbow room) of working back along the threads of meanins, of abandoning no site of the signifier without endeavoring to ascertain the code or codes of which this site is perhaps the starting point (or the goal)…. (S/Z 12)
In more selectively culling its lexia but less selectively organizing its interpretive codes (the uncategorized associations), the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive highlights both the entrances and vanishings of the text — where each instance of the church motif begins and ends and the voices and codes that weave therein, that channel them from other parts of the narrative but are amplified and cut off. (In much the same way, the church is for Proust’s narrator both the origin and the end, the orienting post.) And for the sake of recalling these instances it uses the advantages of the digital medium to archive and reorganize the text(s), to build itself accretively on its voices, just as a church or a book embodies those voices (of history, of love, of war, of strife and hope).
March 12th, 2008
While considering a taxonomic versus a folksonomic labeling of passages in the archive, it occurred to me that there are benefits to having both in the search engine and search results.
The taxonomic approach would be a codified and rigorous — and therefore arbitrarily limited — categorization of narrative elements a priori. As a search functionality it would constrain the method in such a way that the selection of narrative elements would form a cohesive set of criteria on which to assess the passages. As a results parameter it would allow the researcher to view the other narrative elements with which a given one coincides and, using analytical tools, to articulate the large- and small-scale patterns in which the church motif operates.
In that respect the archive would function like a moving S/Z, staking the narrative grounds on which to assess the operation of the narrative and following them to their fullest conclusion.
However, what is valuable in the Associations as they currently stand is their haphazard, a posteriori formulation, generated during the act of reading. The richness of threads that continually and unexpectedly enter the mind during reading should definitely be archived as part of the critical response to the text, as an adjunct to the blog and forum.
The folksonomic approach, therefore, would incorporate a tool that enables readers of the archive to annotate passages with their own Associations, contributing another dimension to the architecture of the search engine, the richness of results, and the quality of critical discourse. The folksonomic approach would hybridize the narratological method with a sort of reader-response mechanism, allowing a comparison of both as part of the long-term evolution of the study of the Recherche.
Ideally the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive would become a micro institution, functioning like a cross between an academic periodical and a book with multiple contributors. What form(s) will the full-length study(ies) ultimately take?
September 20th, 2007
For the last session of the conference, on Saturday 17 March, I attended the Pedagogy and Textual Studies Roundtable. This was a very lively session with smart advice and anecdotes from both the panelists and the audience. It was chaired by Maura Ives of Texas A&M.
- Dan O’Sullivan (U of Mississippi): “Teaching Pre-print Textuality to Post-print Students” — Took a group of honors students to the Bibliothèque Nationale, in Paris, after a seminar on medieval material textuality. Recruitment for the seminar and the trip was difficult, but he ended up taking a handful of students to see the manuscripts they had studied during the seminar.
- Katherine Harris (San Jose State U): “Sneaking it In: Teaching Textual Studies without Teaching Textual Studies” — Devised a few lessons to teach differences and similarities between authorship and editorial practice. In an introduction to literary criticism course, she addressed copyright law and the concepts of authorship and editorial practices by having her students read Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and then Kathy Acker’s essay “Plagiarism,” which lifts the first paragraph of Dickens’ novel. They also get into the lawsuit over The Wind Done Gone, a retelling of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. She also had her students look at the source code of an online version of Great Expectations, which allowed them to realize that it’s a version of a material text and to discuss the role of technology in literature–including print culture. At that point, she brings out her 19th Century cigarette cards of Dickens’ characters, making sure her students are able to “touch the stuff” and realize the importance of material culture.
- John K. Young (Marshall U): “Textual Instability and Undergraduates” — Assigned different editions of Richard Wright’s Native Son and had his students do a comparative activity. It conveyed the notion of authorship as a social process and showed that the author’s true intentions are unrecoverable. The uncertainty of the material text reinforces the ways students receive textuality in the rest of their lives.
- Martha Nell Smith (U of Maryland): “Back to the Future: Teaching Manuscripts to Undergraduates” — One of her primary teaching questions is ‘how did the poem on your page get there?’ She then guides them through the processes of the author, editor, and so on, and allows her students to see different states of finished and unfinished works — both digital and print artifacts.
- Archie Burnett (Boston U): “Boston University’s Editorial Institute, and one of its Courses” — Related the prehistory, founding, and evolution of Boston University’s Editorial Institute and discussed the topics covered by its degree program.
May 28th, 2007
About two weeks ago I met with a few folks from the Institute for the Future of the Book to talk about starting collaborative communities. Right before our meeting I had a couple of ideas about creating commentary space within the archive search results and making the whole thing more editable by readers. So I went to the Institute’s place in Williamsburg thinking we’d have two “separate” discussions about community and interactive functionality. But once the brainstorming session got going I was struck by how intimately the two were bound together.
One of the recurring points was that this archive, as currently constructed around the church motif, is “my reading” of Proust. I began to see that it would probably be difficult to interest others in participating when their readings of the Recherche — re: gender, airplanes, phenomenology or whatever — would have little impact on the archive itself. There was also a sense that it would be difficult to form a community around a project that an individual has already brought to a fair level of completion.
Most literary digital archives provide scholars with material but go no further. The value here would lie in taking the next step of providing commentary space within the search results themselves — not just in the blog and discussion board spaces. The ability of readers to add images, tag passages, or even add new passages would take that principle even further and make the archive itself a collaborative reading of the Recherche. And of course making the commentary searchable would add yet another dimension.
But why bother? What purpose(s) does this archive serve? What would it contribute to the field of literary scholarship?
Put plainly, The Archive has changed. The traditional model of humanities research commonly identified as ‘the lone scholar in the archive’ has been opened by digital networks and social software. This has been the case for years, especially since blogs and wikis became popular. Yet scholarly blogs tend overwhelmingly to be individuals’ personal web journals, which means that the model of the lone writer — despite post comments — still persists. That’s not a bad thing, and I’m not saying it should go away, but neither is it an effective use of the advantages offered by the technology.
The distributed, long-term conversation that has been happening in articles, books, conferences, and classrooms over the years will continue, of course, and it should. But social software allows us to publish at will, to communicate with similarly interested scholars wherever they are, whenever we like, and thereby to generate and hone ideas collaboratively as they are being developed.
A couple of interesting experiments along this line have been tried by Mitchell Stephens, a journalism professor at NYU who has been collaborating with the Institute for the Future of the Book. He put up a blog where his book on the history of atheism, Without Gods, was discussed, challenged, corrected, and questioned by readers during the composition process. Similarly, he put up a paper designed as a discussion: The Holy of Holies features a more effective commentary space, developed by the Institute, that ties comments to specific paragraphs. I could see working something like that into the search results of this archive. There was word, too, of making that comment functionality a WordPress plugin, which would be very useful for a number of projects.
This archive could take some lessons from the collaboration of Mitchell, his readers, and the Institute. I envision the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive as a more open-ended work of collaborative literary criticism, one that has the purpose of thinking and writing about Proust for its own sake, of developing ideas in conversation, but also as a space for spawning other projects. That is to say, blog members need not write about Proust and churches, but as long as there’s some focus on Proust or other related topics such as technology, media, publishing, theory, and so on, it could have that eclectic interest but guided by a common thread. And one of the possibilities could be that people working on books or articles might develop them collaboratively at the archive.
That suggests to me that the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive could instead become something with a broader focus, where people can enter and tag passages, images, and other media to influence the structure of the archive with their own readings. The issue of copyright (I had to pay for the use of the text featured here) is a can of worms I don’t have space to address in this post. Regardless, the amount of development required to expand this archive as mentioned would likely necessitate substantial funding. So probably a preliminary group would need to figure out what needs to be done in order to apply for a grant and then take it from there.
But the point is that if this is to become a useful resource where people think and also learn by doing, it will have to become editable by readers in some form or other, and by that very admission I can’t determine it all by myself.
So, this is a preliminary step to see what kind of feedback is out there. I would greatly appreciate any thoughts, suggestions or criticisms. And I would especially like to thank Ben Vershbow, Jesse Wilbur, Eddie Tejeda, and Dan Visel for taking the time to meet with me. If anyone is interested in participating somehow, please don’t hesitate to contact me at jdrouin@gc.cuny.edu.
January 29th, 2007