Structuring Literature: Variants and Functions of Reflective Passages in Narrative Fiction

结构化文学：叙事小说中反思段落的变体和功能

• 批准号: 424264086
• 负责人: Professorin Dr. Anke Holler
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Seminar für Deutsche Philologie
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Priority Programmes
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2018-12-31 至 2022-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/424264086?language=en
• 关键词: Structuring; Literature; Variants; Functions; Reflective

"All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," is the first sentence of Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" and one of the most talked about examples of reflection in fictional literature. Although even lay people distinguish such reflective passages in novels from passages that report actions or describe characters, reflective passages have not yet been established as a research topic in their own right in literary studies. Against this backdrop the project will combine insights from literary studies, linguistics, computational modelling and quantitative as well as qualitative text analysis to (i) elaborate and formalise a comprehensive concept of reflective passage, (ii) identify and classify such reflective passages in narrative fiction and (iii) explain their patterns of occurrence in roughly 350 years of literary history. To this end, the project will build on previous work for identifying reflection automatically in other text types as well as work on detecting related phenomena such as genericity and epistemic status and extend and combine these in a linguistically informed machine learning framework for finding author/narrator-attributed and character-attributed reflective passages in narrative fiction. By applying our models to a large corpus of German literature spanning several centuries, we will be able to identify periods in which reflection was particularly prevalent (“boom periods”). We will also look more closely at two prominent variants of reflective storytelling in literary history: essayistic and encyclopedic narration. We will compare automatically identified essayistic and encyclopedic passages in narrative fiction to non-fictional essays and encyclopedic texts and investigate similarities and differences with respect to style, topic and the epistemic status of clauses in order to identify internal as well as external functions of these passages in relation to the literary works and their socio-cultural context. Our contribution to the overall Priority Program “Computational Literary Studies” consists in (i) operationalizing a basic concept from literary theory by performing a qualitative and quantitative corpus study, (ii) enriching the methodic options to structure literary texts, (iii) developing novel computational models for detecting reflection and related phenomena and demonstrating the usefulness of these algorithmic methods for literary historiography as well as the integration of their results into the qualitative research process, and (iv) creating and releasing a corpus manually annotated for reflection.

托尔斯泰的《安娜·卡列尼娜》中的第一句话是：所有幸福的家庭都是相似的，每个不幸的家庭都有自己的不幸。这句话也是小说中最常被提及的反思例子之一。尽管即使是外行人也将小说中的反思段落与报道行为或描述人物的段落区分开来，但在文学研究中，反思段落本身还没有被确立为研究主题。在此背景下，该项目将结合文学研究、语言学、计算模型以及定量和定性文本分析的见解，(I)阐述并正式确定反思段落的全面概念，(Ii)识别和分类叙事小说中的此类反思段落，以及(Iii)解释它们在大约350年的文学史上的发生模式。为此，该项目将在以前工作的基础上，自动识别其他文本类型中的反射，以及检测相关现象，如概括性和认知性状态，并将其扩展和结合到一个语言信息机器学习框架中，以便在叙事小说中找到作者/叙述者和人物属性的反思性段落。通过将我们的模型应用于跨越几个世纪的大型德国文学语料库，我们将能够识别出反思特别盛行的时期(“繁荣时期”)。我们还将更仔细地研究文学史上两种突出的反思性讲故事形式：散文式和百科全书式的叙述。我们将对叙事小说中自动识别的散文和百科全书段落与非虚构散文和百科全书文本进行比较，并考察这些段落在文体、主题和从句的认知地位方面的异同，以确定这些段落与文学作品及其社会文化语境的内部和外部功能。我们对总体优先计划“计算文学研究”的贡献在于：(I)通过进行定性和定量的语料库研究来操作文学理论的基本概念，(Ii)丰富构建文学文本的方法选择，(Iii)开发新的计算模型来检测反思和相关现象，并展示这些算法方法在文学史研究中的有用性以及将其结果整合到定性研究过程中，以及(Iv)创建和发布手动注释的反思语料库。