Computation, Text, and Form in Literary Criticism: A Conversation with Claude 3.7

I've posted a new working paper. Title above, links, abstract, contents, and introduction below.

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/128029987/Computation_Text_and_Form_in_Literary_Criticism_A_Conversation_with_Claude_3_7
SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5166930
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/389591524_Computation_Text_and_Form_in_Literary_Criticism_A_Conversation_with_Claude_37

Abstract: Literary criticism operates with contradictory definitions of “text,” rarely meaning simply the marks on a page. This makes it difficult to establish what “form” means. While critics do analyze features like rhyme and meter, or the distinction between story (fabula) and plot (syuzhet) criticism rarely seeks to understand how words are arranged in texts beyond these basics. Literary criticism selectively borrowed from Lévi-Strauss's structural analysis of myth (e.g. the concept of binary oppositions), it ignored a systematic methodology that was essentially computational in nature and about form. Now, Large Language Models present a watershed moment for literary studies - they're unavoidable and demonstrate sophisticated capabilities. A cohort of younger scholars using corpus linguistics and computational methods may represent a bridge between computational and literary approaches. Will these scholars extend computational thinking from method to theory? - using computation not just as an analytical tool but as a framework for understanding how literary texts function – that’s a key issue currently before the discipline. 

Contents

How Do You Explain Computation to a Literary Critic? 1

What am I trying to explain to myself? 1
Why do literary critics need to know that? 2
The study of literary form 3

My Conversation about Computation with Claude 3.7 5

What is a text? 6
Literary criticism after World War II 7
What is Literary Form 8
Lévi-Strauss on Myth 10
The Current Situation: LLMs 12
Digital Humanities 13

How Do You Explain Computation to a Literary Critic?

I have been interested in conceptualizing literary processes as computational ones ever since I wrote an MA thesis on “Kubla Khan” in the early 1970s. Literary process? How texts are created and how they are read and assimilated, that’s what I mean. Ever since then I have been trying to explain that to literary critics. That has not gone well. I’ve also been trying to explain it to myself, which is a different kind of problem. The purpose of this paper is to, once more, attempt to explain computation-as-literary-process both to literary critics and to myself.

In the rest of this introduction I talk about explaining computation, first to myself, and then to literary critics. The rest of this paper consists of a discussion I had with Claude 3.7 about computation and literary criticism. I begin by discussing the text, then discuss the post WWII focus on interpretation as the central activity of literary criticism. Then Claude and I take up form, the influence of Lévi-Strauss, and the current emergence of large language models (LLMs). We conclude with some remarks about digital humanities.

What am I trying to explain to myself?

I know what kind of questions follow from thinking about literary processes as computational. I’ve done practical criticism on that foundation for decades, some quite rigorous, some rather informal, but all based on the belief that literary processes are computational processes. What is it that I’m trying to understand?

Let me explain: My basic conception derives from the use of parentheses in arithmetic or algebraic expressions. Without parentheses or a specific convention concerning operator precedence, expressions like this next one are ambiguous: 5 × 6 – 3. We can resolve the ambiguity by adding parentheses, giving us either of these two expressions:

(5 × 6) – 3 = 27
5 × (6 – 3) = 15

Adding parentheses places boundaries in the expression that affect how we evaluate it.

The same applies to texts, any texts, not just literary texts. Texts are strings of alphanumeric characters. Small sets of characters are grouped together into words and words are organized into longer strings by using spaces, punctuation marks, and capital letters. Boundaries divide long strings into substrings to whatever depth is necessary. Linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics all proceed on that basis.

As far as I’m concerned “computation” is the best name for that process, whether we’re talking about language or arithmetic or mathematics in general. In this context arithmetic is, in effect, a very constrained and specialized kind of language.

Since I’ve known that for years, what is it that I’ve only just now realized? It’s not a matter of new information or ideas, it’s a matter of emphasis, of framing. What I’ve realized is simple: That’s all there is. Let me repeat that: Computation is all there is. That is to say, if we are going to treat literary texts as physical objects, as strings of symbols realized in some physical medium, such as vibrations in air or marks on a surface, if that’s what we’re going to do, then computation is the only physical process we know of that gives us ways of thinking about how strings can support the communication of meaning between individuals. That’s it.

Commensurability is the issue. Computation is a process that is commensurate with the physical text. Why? Because computation, real computation, is itself a physical process. That’s obvious when you consider computation with an abacus, for example. The same is true for a mechanical calculator or a slide rule. The physical nature of computation with a digital computer is less visible, much less, and hardly palpable. But it is no less real. Bits and bytes may appear to be abstract things, but they take up physical space in computer memories; that’s why the capacity of computer memories is measured in bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, etc. Computation takes place in time, and time is physical as well, though one can’t see it, touch it, or taste it, much less lift it. Computers and their processes are physical things, as are human brains. As such they are commensurate with physical texts.

That’s what literary critics need to know. Alas, they are incapable of hearing it, of taking it seriously. Why? Computers are machines, and, as such are at suspect at best and thus to be ignored, and at worst they are evil, and actively to be opposed. This reflects the historical distinction between the sciences and humanities, a distinction that has been written into the institutional structure of the academic world and so has come to seem inscribed in the foundations of the universe.

Like it or not, that universe is all but finished. We are now living in a world where anyone with an internet connection can engage in sophisticated linguistic activity with a machine, a chatbot. That changes everything. The physical text can no longer be effaced in favor some vague abstract object conjured into (virtual) existence by the act of interpretation.

Why do literary critics need to know that?

They need to know it because it allows for a much more robust and substantial analysis of literary form than is currently practiced. Literary texts are linguistic strings. The form of strings is a matter of how elements are arranged on the string. That’s obvious in the case of, say, colored beads on a string. And that’s how musicians and musicologists treat musical form, as the arrangement of sonic objects in a line, where the line tracks the passage of time.

Literary critics do this as well. When critics work out the rhyme scheme of a poem, they’re treating it as a physical object. When narratologists distinguish between story (fabula) and plot (syuzhet), they are treating the text as a physical object, one where story episodes are ordered into a narrative string. One can mention other examples as well. While those operations are well-established, they are a minor aspect practical criticism. Form is treated as a framework in which one can approach the problem of meaning. Its description and analysis are at best a secondary activity.

Interpretation is primary. And when critics start interpreting a text, they tacitly, surreptitiously, efface the physical text in favor of an abstract and poorly defined object to which they then direct their interpretive activities. To complete the mystification, that abstract and poorly defined object is called – you guessed it – the “text.”

But these chatbots – I’ve been working with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude – they handle language in a way that is astonishingly humanlike, and they are undoubtedly machines, albeit in the strange and special way that computers are machines. They’re not made of gears, levers, axles, pulleys and motors, but their operations are mechanistic in kind, as the word “machine” has come to be understood. Yes, there are serious philosophical issues about whether or they really understand language, whether or not they’re really dealing in meaning. I’ve thought about these issues, and written quite a bit about them, but this is not the place to entertain those discussions. Whatever these machines are doing, to a first approximation it looks like they’re going language.

While I believe that this technology is a source of useful tools, both for literary critics and others, and will become more so in the future, that’s not why I mention them here. I mention them because they constitute an unmistakable “existence proof” that thinking about language process as computational is fruitful, both intellectually and practically. Once we can do that, we can take literary form as a serious object of critical activity.

The study of literary form

Yes, I know that form is an important concept in literary criticism and that the discipline has seen various formalist critical approaches. But as Claude and I discuss, formalism doesn’t not imply close attention to the formal properties of literary texts. Rather, formalism is a philosophical position about the nature meaning in which meaning in literary texts is taken to be somehow different from meaning in other texts by virtue literary form. But form itself is given only cursory attention.

My primary object here is to mention what is perhaps the best-known essay by Susan Sonntag, “Against Interpretation.” It originally appeared in 1964 in the Evergreen Review and became the title essay in her first collection, which was published in 1966. In that essay she asserted:

In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling.

Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Several pages later she asserts:

What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art. If excessive stress on content provokes the arrogance of interpretation, more extended and more thorough descriptions of form would silence. What is needed is a vocabulary—a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary—for forms.

It seems like everybody read that essay at that time, but as far as I can tell, no one took Sonntag seriously. Now’s the time; to quote Charlie Parker, now’s the time.

The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. But this is not the place to serve pudding. If you want to read some examples, here are some examples from my own work that are unlike work readily available in the standard literature:

Articulate Vision: A Structuralist Reading of "Kubla Khan", Language and Style, Vol. 8: 3-29, 1985, https://www.academia.edu/8155602/Articulate_Vision_A_Structuralist_Reading_of_Kubla_Khan_. This is a revised and somewhat shorted version of my 1972 master’s thesis.

Heart of Darkness: Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis on Several Scales, Version 5, Working Paper, October 27, 2019, https://www.academia.edu/8132174/Heart_of_Darkness_Qualitative_and_Quantitative_Analysis_on_Several_Scales_Version_5. This is an eclectic collection of remarks about Conrad’s novel, but there is a formal analysis that is crucial, one that takes paragraph length as its point of departure. The longest paragraph is both structurally and thematically central.

The Gojira Papers, April 15, 2014, https://www.academia.edu/7905287/The_Gojira_Papers. This is about the 1954 Japanese film that started the Godzilla franchise.

Here is a theoretical and methodological account of some length (23,000 words, 11 diagrams):

Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form, PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, August 2006, Article 060608, https://www.academia.edu/235110/Literary_Morphology_Nine_Propositions_in_a_Naturalist_Theory_of_Form.

LLM as Collaborator, Part 2: Formal structure in Heart of Darkness and literary criticism (+ a lesson on “alignment”)

The chart below depicts the length of paragraphs in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The paragraphs are listed in order, first to last, from left to right. The length of a bar is proportional to the number of words in the respective paragraph.

There is an important issue at stake: Does that chart depict a phenomenon that is real, not only in the sense that it represents a set of valid measurements, but in the deeper sense that those measurements represent some intrinsic aspect of the causal process that produced the text. For the most part I leave that issue to the discussion I had with Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

The purpose of this introduction is to indicate why the issue arises.

The problem of literary form

Despite the fact that form and formalism are important concepts in academic literary criticism, the careful description of form is not central to current practice. This is not the place to discuss this issue in any detail. I have done that elsewhere on New Savanna, I have published a long article on form (Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form), and have written a number of working papers on description.

Form is an aspect of the physical substance of the work of art. That is quite obvious in the case of drawing, painting, and sculpture. That is also true in the case of music, where we are interested in the arrangement of sounds in time, and dance, the arrangement of gestures and movement. Literature is like that as well; it is a string of words, one after the other after the other after the other. It follows, then, that the description of literary form involves analyzing how words are placed in a string.

And there is some of that in literary criticism. In dealing with poetry one may learn how to count feet in a line and work out the rhyme scheme, if there is any. But this is often treated as decorative and unrelated to meaning in any deep way, and it’s meaning that critics are after. In the study of narrative the Russian Formalists made a distinction between story (fabula) and plot (syuzhet), where the former refers the events as they occur in order while the latter is the order in which events are introduced into the narrative. In the extreme case of Tristram Shandy, for example, plot and story are quite different. This distinction, and more, is quite important in narratology, but narratology is a relatively minor approach to literary criticism and one that is more important in Europe than the United States.

As an example of this situation, here’s a few lines from an essay by Frances Ferguson and John Brenkwood introducing papers from the 2013 English Institute on form:

A second irony is that the recently renewed interest in questions of literary form has proved quite amorphous. Perhaps, though, that has been the predicament and vitality of the topic all along. [...] There is also a conflict, cutting across these competing methods, between form as a feature of literary works and form as constitutive of literary works. The New critics are often the benchmark of formalism in American discussions, but they did very little to illuminate literary forms compared to the Russian Formalists or, say, Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson’s classic essay on Baudelaire’s “Les chats.” [...] And yet even the surest markers of literary forms fail to define form when it comes to actual works. The form of the sonnet, for example, is readily defined by the number of lines and the stanza organization, but does that account for a particular sonnet’s form any more than a rectangle accounts for a painting’s form? Vertical for portraits, horizontal for landscapes! And, finally, is formalism itself based on the idea that literary works are purely form, or on the idea that the vocation of literary criticism lies in formalization, that is, in its capacity to create categories at a level of abstraction applicable to the widest variety of literary phenomena?

The upshot of this conundrum is that literary form is more an object of wonder and a source of methodological argument than the basis of practical criticism. It’s important, but we don’t know much about it.

Thus, that chart is something of an embarrassment to literary critics, or would be if they saw it. On the one hand, it represents and objective fact about Heart of Darkness. When you count the words in each paragraph and graph the result, that chart is what you get. [I used the text provided by Project Gutenberg.] Once you’ve seen it, you can’t argue it out of existence.

Now, I’ve been in this business a long time. While I’ve discussed that chart and its implications extensively in my working paper on Heart of Darkness, I’ve not bothered to seek formal publication. Why not? Opportunity cost. I don’t know of any venue that would be interested and I don’t want to waste my time jumping through hoops making that work acceptable to some journal only to wait six months to a year or more to have it turned down (though I’m seriously considering taking a shot at it in the new year; we’ll see).

However, when I discovered that structure I did send at note to Mark Liberman, who runs, Language Log, and group log devoted to linguistics. He was kind enough to post a link and we had a lively discussion, Markov’s Heart of Darkness. The discussion started with the issue of whether or not paragraph length followed a power law as that’s the question I presented to Mark; it does not. But one Lucy Kemnitzer brought up the issue of order during the discussion and I linked to a post in which I had the chart I posted above. If you look through that discussion, you’ll find comments by someone identifying themselves as “JL” and noting that they are a novelist. They’re quite dismissive of that kind of description and the analytical work it supports:

The question is whether you're adding anything at all to anyone's understanding of the book, or whether, instead, you're indulging in puffery and pseudoscience, bringing in spurious mathematical models and childish anthropological "theories" to gaudy up a banal and perfectly obvious account of a very well known phenomenon. (Look! I've discovered that the ratio of vowels to consonants in 'The Waste Land' is exactly equivalent to Planck's Constant! Which is used to explain black holes! See? It really is a depressing poem…)

That’s the kind of reaction I expect of well-trained humanists.

Ask Claude

And so I turned to Claude 3.5 Sonata. What would they think of that distribution of paragraph lengths?

I’d already loaded the entire text of Heart of Darkness into Claude and had some discussion about it (I’ve already posted some of that discussion). It was a simple matter to reactive that discussion, upload the chart, and initiate a discussion. The discussion went well, at least from my point of view. Claude even pointed out some things that I hadn’t noticed.

But after all the (standard) literary criticism it surely must have ingested during training, why didn’t it react with, if not outrage, certainly skepticism? Why wasn’t it aligned, as the kids say, with the conventional wisdom on this matter? Context, I figured, context. This interaction was loaded with Conrad’s text and extensive earlier discussion. Standard literary criticism was nowhere to be found in the immediate context.

“I wonder,” thought I to myself, “if I could create a context in which Claude would register a conventional reaction to that chart?” No sooner had I registered that thought than I figured out how to do it. I had previously loaded Claude with the Hamlet chapter from Harold Bloom’s, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. I’d asked Claude to summarize the chapter and then we had a little discussion.

So, I reactivated that discussion, uploaded the chart, and BOOM! Claude reacted with the expected skepticism, albeit a rather mild expression of it:

Based on Bloom's critical approach, he would likely be skeptical of this kind of quantitative or structural analysis of literature. He would probably view this chart as an example of what he saw as the problematic tendency in modern literary criticism to focus on technical or formal aspects rather than aesthetic and imaginative power

The discussion went on for a bit, took an interesting turn, at which point I decided to introduced Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay, “Against Interpretation,” into the discussion. Why? Because she argued that “criticism needs to focus less on trying to extract hidden meanings from art and more on describing the direct sensory and formal experience of engaging with it” (Claude’s words). We had an interesting discussion. For what it’s worth, Claude agrees with my view that literary criticism needs to pay more attention to the analysis and description of literary form.

An exercise for the reader: What does Claude’s ability to take different and contradictory positions on the same issue – in this case, the value of that chart for analyzing Heart of Darkness – suggest about the much-discussed problem of AI alignment?

* * * * *

First, we have my discussion with Claude about Heart of Darkness. Once that’s finished, I introduce the Harold Bloom discussion, which leads to Susan Sontag. As always my prompts are in bold face while Claude’s responses are plain.

I’ve uploaded a bar graph. Each bar represents a single paragraph in Heart of Darkness. They are arranged in order, with the first paragraph on the left edge and the last paragraph on the right. Do you have any observations about paragraph length as revealed in this chart?

Looking at this visualization of paragraph lengths in "Heart of Darkness," several key observations emerge:

Most paragraphs in the novel are relatively short, with many falling under 200 words. This creates a baseline rhythm for the narrative. However, there are significant spikes where paragraphs become much longer, particularly in the middle section of the text.

The most striking feature is a dramatic peak of approximately 1,400 words around paragraph 109-110. This extensive paragraph appears to be an outlier, being significantly longer than those around it. There are also several other notable peaks reaching between 600-1,000 words.

This variation in paragraph length suggests a deliberate structural choice by Conrad. The longer paragraphs likely correspond to key moments of exposition or critical narrative developments, while the shorter paragraphs maintain the story's forward momentum and may handle more immediate action or dialogue.

The pattern also shows that the novel ends with a series of consistently shorter paragraphs, perhaps indicating a more rapid narrative pace as the story reaches its conclusion.

This visualization effectively reveals Conrad's technical approach to pacing and structure in the novel, showing how he varies paragraph length to create rhythm and emphasis throughout the text.

Would you be interested in identifying what narrative content appears in those particularly long paragraphs? That might help us understand why Conrad chose to expand certain moments in the story.

You’d think that variation was deliberate. But we have no evidence that Conrad was conscious of this. He just did it. It’s how he wrote.

You make an excellent point. I fell into a common critical trap of assuming intentionality where we have no evidence for it. This pattern of paragraph length variation emerged naturally from Conrad's writing process - it's simply his natural rhythm as a writer.

This observation connects to a broader point about literary analysis. While we can usefully identify patterns and structures in texts, we should be cautious about assuming these were consciously planned by the author. Sometimes the most powerful effects in literature arise organically from how a writer naturally approaches their craft.

In Conrad's case, this varying paragraph length creates compelling effects in "Heart of Darkness," but we don't need to attribute this to conscious design. It's simply part of how he told stories, his natural way of allowing some moments to expand while keeping others concise.

This is a useful reminder about the difference between identifying patterns in a text and making claims about authorial intention.

That single longest paragraph, I believe it’s 1502 words long, is that nexus paragraph we’ve already discussed.

I’ve already had extensive discussion about this paragraph with Claude. Here's part of that discussion, though it doesn't contain Claude's remarks about the nexus paragraph. However, here’s my original blog post about that paragraph. And this post places that paragraph in the context of the whole text.

That's a fascinating discovery about the nexus paragraph! The fact that it’s not only structurally and thematically central to the novel, but also stands out quantitatively as the longest paragraph, adds another dimension to our understanding of its importance.

This paragraph accomplishes several crucial narrative tasks: it provides Kurtz's European background, introduces his report with the chilling "Exterminate all the brutes" line, and frames the death of the helmsman. The paragraph's exceptional length seems to naturally correspond to its function of bringing together multiple strands of the story.

Some notes on how I discovered formal structure in some literary texts, Part 1: Four cases

What is intelligence? How does it work? Those and related questions have been with us for a while, but their salience has been amplified in the wake of ChatGPT, which is given us a demonstration of machine intelligence, whatever that is, that is accessible to anyone with access to the web. Those questions have ceased to be of interest primarily to psychologists, philosophers, and AI researchers. Now “everyone” is interested in them.

Perhaps the single most pressing issue is: While machine intelligence ever reach, or even surpass, human intelligence? The concept of intelligence is so obscure, however, that it’s difficult to produce compelling answers. Earlier in this year I decided to take another crack at the problem, AI, Chess, and Language 1: Two VERY Different Beasts. That post has, in turn, led to a series of posts on chess and language.

More recently, I did a long post centered on analogy, Intelligence, A.I. and analogy: Jaws & Girard, kumquats & MiGs, double-entry bookkeeping & supply and demand, and another in which I talked about wanting an AI that could determine the formal structure of literary texts, What do I personally want from an AI? [as soon as possible, too, NOT in the distant future]. Neither of those posts says anything about chess, but they’re certainly on the language side of the ledger. That’s led to the idea of reflecting on what I’ve had to do to discover formal structures in texts.

I’ve done a lot of this. Which texts should I use?

Kubla Khan

“Kubla Khan” is the most important example. That’s where I started, and it’s the most richly developed example. Furthermore, I’ve published that work in the formal literature and I’ve already written quite a bit (informally) about how I came to do that work.

Here's the articles about the poem:

Articulate Vision: A Structuralist Reading of "Kubla Khan", Language and Style, Vol. 8: 3-29, 1985, https://www.academia.edu/8155602/Articulate_Vision_A_Structuralist_Reading_of_Kubla_Khan_

“Kubla Khan” and the Embodied Mind, PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, Article 030915, November 29, 2003, https://www.academia.edu/8810242/_Kubla_Khan_and_the_Embodied_Mind

These papers have background:

Touchstones • Strange Encounters • Strange Poems • the beginning of an intellectual life, November 2015, https://www.academia.edu/9814276/Touchstones_Strange_Encounters_Strange_Poems_the_beginning_of_an_intellectual_life

Beyond Lévi-Strauss on Myth: Objectification, Computation, and Cognition, Working Paper, February 2015, pp. 20-27, https://www.academia.edu/10541585/Beyond_L%C3%A9vi_Strauss_on_Myth_Objectification_Computation_and_Cognition

I originally published the “Touchstones” piece in a journal edited by one of my teachers in graduate school, the late Art Efron: Paunch 42–43: 4–16, December 1975. It’s about my years at Johns Hopkins and how I came to do a Master’s Thesis on “Kubla Khan.” I’ve linked to a version which I’ve updated with notes that I’ve inserted into the text, notes commenting one what’s happened since then. The Lévi-Strauss piece is generally about the intellectual significance of his work on myth while the section, “Into Lévi-Strauss and Out Through ‘Kubla Khan’” is specifically about how Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism guided my approach to the poem.

Three Shakespeare Plays

This is about three Shakespeare plays, a comedy (Much Ado About Nothing), a tragedy (Othello), and a so-called romance or tragi-comedy (The Winter’s Tale). In each of these plays a man wrongly suspects his beloved of betraying him with another man. Consider the following diagram:

Along the left I've listed five dramatic functions which some character must play. In the columns for each play I've indicated the character that takes these functions. The point of the diagram as the we move from one genre to the next (in this order) one function seems to disappear. Othello has no mentor, but he has a deceiver; and Leontes has neither a mentor nor a deceiver. What I think is going on is that functions are, in effect, being absorbed into the protagonist. At the play's opening, Othello is senior enough in the world that he has no need of a mentor. Leontes is king in his world, so there is no one higher. As for being deceived about his wife, he does that to himself, no external agent required.

There's more to the pattern than that, but that’s enough to give you an idea about what’s going on. The analytic point is that this is a pattern which becomes visible only when you compare texts. That’s something that Lévi-Strauss did in his work on myth.

Here's the article I published about that:

At the Edge of the Modern, or Why is Prospero Shakespeare's Greatest Creation? Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 21 (3): 259-279, 1998, https://www.academia.edu/235334/At_the_Edge_of_the_Modern_or_Why_is_Prospero_Shakespeares_Greatest_Creation

Metropolis

I’m talking about the manga originally published by Osamu Tezuka in 1949 and not Fritz Lang’s movie of the same title. As you know, manga are Japanese comic books, or graphic novels. I’m including this as a case in the first place because it is an example of ring-form construction, which I depict in the following diagram:

Notice the numbering at the left and the descriptive labels at the right. I’m including it in the second place because it is the first time I used to whole-text table to conduct an analysis. The diagram is reduced from that table.

Here’s the article:

Tezuka's Metropolis: A Modern Japanese Fable About Art and the Cosmos, in Uta Klein, Ktaja Mellmann, Steffanie Metzger, eds. Heurisiken der Literaturwissenschaft: Disciplinexterne Perspektiven auf Literatur. mentis Verlag GmbH, 2006, pp. 527-545, https://www.academia.edu/7959634/Tezuka_s_Metropolis_A_Modern_Japanese_Fable_about_Art_and_the_Cosmos

Here's the analytic table:

Descriptive Tables for Tezuka’s Metropolis, A Note on Descriptive Method, Working Paper, 2016, 8 pp., https://www.academia.edu/27370076/Descriptive_Tables_for_Tezukas_Metropolis_A_Note_on_Descriptive_Method

Heart of Darkness

It turns out that Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is also a ring-form text, or a close variant. Consider the following chart:

Each bar represents a single paragraph in the text. The length of the bar corresponds to the number of words in the text. The bars are arranged in the order they exist in the text, first to last, from left to right.

Notice that there is one paragraph that is noticeably longer than all the others. It has 1502 words. It is the structural center of the text. There’s much more to be said about that paragraph and its place in the text. But this is not the place to do it.

You can find those discussions, and others, in this working paper:

Heart of Darkness: Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis on Several Scales, Version 3, Working Paper, August 9, 2018, 49 pp., https://www.academia.edu/8132174/Heart_of_Darkness_Qualitative_and_Quantitative_Analysis_on_Several_Scales_Version_3

I have two main reasons for including this case as an example of discovery. In the first case, that chart depicts something that is clearly an objective fact of Conrad’s text. It’s not something I conjured out of the mist through interpretive wizardry. I make the same claim about the formal structures in the other three cases. That’s why I’m calling them discoveries; they’re as real as a vein of gold in the Klondike.

And the process by which I discovered that structure in Heart of Darkness was, if anything, more serendipitous than a gold strike. The prospector who gets a gold strike was looking for gold. I wasn’t looking for a ring-form pattern in Conrad’s text. Not only that, but charting paragraph lengths is not something one normally does with literary texts or, as far as I know, any other texts. I did it on a whim. While I did have a formal reason for looking at that particular paragraph, it didn’t have anything to do with ring-composition. While examining that paragraph I noticed that it seemed unusually long. Perhaps it was even the longest one in the text. So I decided to take a look. Out of mere curiosity.

But I’ve said enough about that so far. I’ll say more later. Here’s the point at issue: How do you construct at AI to discover something of a kind that it didn’t know exists? That’s what I did in this case and in “Kubla Khan” as well. The pattern I discovered across those three Shakespeare plays is arguably related to the sort of thing I’d seen in Lévi-Strauss’s work on myth, though quite different in the details. As for the ring-composition in Metropolis, ring-composition is well-enough known, though not much studied by literary critics. I was alerted to it by the late Mary Douglas. 

The importance of visualization

I don't see how I could have done any of that work without visualization. I could have spotted that something was going on in the Shakespeare case, and maybe, just maybe, I could have made an argument without that simple diagram. But the fact is that that's not how I did it. More precisely, I might have imagined the argument I ended up making without drawing that table. But I can't imagine trying to write it up without making the table. The table allows you to see the structural phenomenon at a glance.

In the other three cases diagrams were an essential part in seeing the phenomenon at all. Since I didn't include any diagram from the "Kubla Khan" work in this post, I will here explicitly state that diagramming was essential to my "Kubla Khan" work from the beginning.

All of which is to say that in each case, two distinctly different methods of thought were important. What does that imply about the possibilities of artificial intelligence?

Can an LLM identify ring-composition in a literary text? [ChatGPT]

Tentatively, very tentatively, yes. ChatGPT has done it, once. I believe a more powerful engine could do more.

But: What is ring-composition?

Quickly and briefly, ring-composition or ring-form is a text with a form like this: A, B, C...X...C’, B’, A’. It’s a text with a central section and the other sections are arrayed symmetrically around. ChatGPT will say a bit more about that later.

Why am I interested in ring-composition? In principle I’m interested in any and all literary form. In practice it is easier to look for a specific kind of formal structure. While some interesting and important texts exhibit ring-composition (e.g. “Kubla Khan,” Heart of Darkness, Hamlet) I have no idea how prevalent it is, nor does anyone else. I suspect it’s a minority form, perhaps even a small minority.

I have come to think of literary study as something like biology: it all starts with description. Biologists have spent centuries seeking out and describing life forms. Some have been described in great detail, others only enough to place them in the taxonomy, and we have all degrees of description in between. Well, literature is like biology in that we have a myriad of objects for study, each with unique features. But literary scholars haven’t undertaken the work of describing our texts. Oh, there’s some work, but little as deep and rich as what biologists have done in their domain – I give links below to material that justifies that claim.

I am particularly interested in form. There’s an inerradicably subjective element to meaning, but form, I believe, can be objectively described. I’ve done enough descriptive work over the years to know that it is painstaking, difficult, and tedious, but not rocket science. It would be useful if we could present our texts to an LLM and have it undertake the difficult tedium of descibing texts. Maybe even have two or three different LLMs describe particular texts independently. Then, just as biologists check one another’s descriptive work, so human critics can vet the work of LLMs. Descriptions of important texts would be examined in great detail, while muc of the work that LLMs have done on minor texts, those texts that no literary critic ever works on at all (like all those 19th century novels lurking in basements in library shelves) may never be checked at all. But it’s there if anyone’s interested.

But could LLMs do the work? We don’t know. In the rest of this post, however, I present some small indication that, yes, they might well be able to do it.

Note: The material in the previous paragraphs deserves more discussion than I’ve given it here. But this is not the place for that. I’ve got many posts on these matters under these labels: description, form, text, and ring-form. If you want one post to read, try this one: The problematics of text and form and the transmutation zone between symbol and thought [once more into the methodological breach]. My Academia.edu page has a section for Ring Composition and one for Description.

First time out: What’s ring-composition? [December 1, 2022]

The first time I had access to ChatGPT I asked it about ring-composition. It’s response was underwhelming.

My prompts are in bold while ChatGPT’s replies are in plain face.

What is ring-composition?

Ring-composition is a type of literary structure in which the end of a text is linked back to the beginning in some meaningful way. It is a closed circle of ideas, images, or words that is created by the repetition of certain elements. Ring-composition is sometimes used to emphasize a theme or to create symmetry in a text.

What are some texts that use ring-composition?

1. The Bible 2. Beowulf 3. Paradise Lost by John Milton 4. The Odyssey by Homer 5. The Iliad by Homer 6. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer 7. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri 8. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville 9. The Aeneid by Virgil

Do any movies use ring-composition?

Yes, some movies have been known to use ring-composition. The movie Memento (2000) is a notable example of a movie that uses this structure. The film begins and ends with the same scene, and certain elements are repeated throughout the movie to create a circular narrative.

Does Shakespeare's Hamlet use ring-composition?

Yes, some scholars have argued that Shakespeare's Hamlet does make use of ring-composition. The play begins and ends with the same scene, and certain elements such as characters, motifs, and words are repeated throughout the play.

The definition is OK, but not at all specific. It would not be a very useful guide. The list of texts seems OK, though Moby Dick seems iffy to me. Critics working on 19th century novels don’t go looking for ring-composition. The answers to the last two questions are too vague to be at all promising. On the whole I had no reason to believe that ChatGPT had a useful idea about ring-composition.

Then, without any specific expectation – though I wasn’t expecting much, I decided to give ChatGPT another try. Not the new and improved ChatCPT Plus, which is hooked up to GPT-4, but just the plain old Chatster. It surprised me.

Much better: What’s ring-composition? [August 31, 2023]

It’s running the August 3 version.

Explain what ring-composition is in literary structure.

Ring composition, also known as chiastic structure or circular composition, is a literary and rhetorical technique where a story or text is structured in a circular or cyclical manner, often beginning and ending with similar or related elements. It involves organizing the narrative or content in such a way that there is a central theme, idea, or event around which the narrative revolves, with related elements or themes mirroring each other in a symmetrical or balanced fashion.

Here are some key characteristics and examples of ring composition:

1. Circular Structure: Ring composition typically presents the narrative in a circular or closed form. This means that the story starts and ends with similar or related elements, creating a sense of closure and unity.

2. Central Theme: At the center of the composition, there is a central theme, event, or idea that serves as the focal point of the narrative. This central element is surrounded by other elements that are related to or mirror it in some way.

3. Mirroring and Parallelism: Elements within the narrative often mirror or parallel each other. This can involve characters, events, motifs, or themes that are presented in a way that draws attention to their similarities or contrasts.

4. Symmetry: Ring compositions often strive for balance and symmetry, with corresponding elements placed in a deliberate and structured manner. This symmetry can enhance the overall aesthetic and thematic impact of the work.

5. Emphasis on the Center: The central element of the composition is usually the most significant and emphasized part of the story. It often represents a turning point or a key revelation in the narrative.

6. Multiple Layers: Ring compositions may have multiple layers of mirroring and parallelism. This can create a complex and intricate structure, with each layer contributing to the overall meaning of the text.

7. Common in Oral Traditions: Ring composition has been a common feature in oral traditions and epic poetry. For example, the structure of Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey" exhibits elements of ring composition, with events and themes mirroring each other throughout the narrative.

8. Rhetorical Device: Beyond storytelling, ring composition is also used as a rhetorical device in speeches and essays to reinforce key points and create a sense of closure and unity in the text.

Ring composition serves various purposes in literature, such as reinforcing themes, creating narrative symmetry, and engaging the reader's or listener's attention by highlighting patterns and connections within the text. It can be a powerful tool for conveying complex ideas and structuring narratives in a memorable and meaningful way.

That’s far more detailed that it gave me back in December. The question is, can it analyze and actual text and identify a ring-form? I decided to have it work on a specific example, the story of St. George and the Dragon, which I had already analyzed. I’m using a text from Wikipedia.

Notice of James Ryan's Shakespeare's Symmetries [ring-form, & a note on opportunity cost]

Jennifer Young, Peter J. Smith, Elinor Parsons, Elisabetta Tarantino, Emanuel Stelzer, Shirley Bell, Ben Haworth, Vanessa Lim, Sheilagh Ilona O’brien, and Louise Powell, Shakespeare, The Year’s Work in English Studies, Volume 0 (2019), p. 36:

James E. Ryan, in Shakespeare’s Symmetries: The Mirrored Structure of Action in the Plays [2016], describes the presence of a chiasmic ABCBA structure in all the ‘mature, non-collaborative plays’ by Shakespeare (p. 2). (If we follow the order of the Norton Shakespeare, the earliest play included in Ryan’s analysis is Love’s Labour’s Lost.) This is a common device, which is found in Old Testament books or Gothic arches, as well as in other literary artefacts. Ryan points out that this is not a narrative-based approach: his ‘keystone scene’ (the non-repeated thematic element that constitutes the ‘C’ in the structure) rarely coincides with the narrative climax. As well as allowing us to perceive subtle thematic elements and to make sense of what has been seen as the jumbled structure of some of the plays (such as King John), this theory has practical usefulness: for instance, according to Ryan it indicates that alternative versions of King Lear and 2 Henry IV, which lack a keystone scene, have been transmitted to us in an incomplete state, rather than representing self-standing earlier versions. It can also serve as an indication of how to divide plays into scenes. In some cases Ryan has to defend what constitutes a ‘scene’ according to his parameters (though we may grant an implicit virtuous circularity to his argument if a ‘scene’ is what works well according to a pattern that is demonstrated to work well in many other cases). When he discusses how the three ‘sourceless’ plays (Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest) all consist of nine scenes, for the middle play he is following a common but not unanimous scene division, and ‘[a]n argument for the traditional division is implicit in [his] analysis of the play’ (p. 224n.). Besides locating within an overall framework individual elements that have already been highlighted by other critics, Ryan supports his claim with detailed structural analyses of twenty-six ‘mature’ plays (as he points out, it is important to view his tables together with the text, because not all of them are lists of scenes that are placed in mirrored sequences). The evidence put forward in this book should be examined with far greater attention than can here be devoted to the task, but is worth taking into consideration in any discussion of the relevant plays.

Indeed, a proper evaluation of Ryan's analysis would require a great deal of attention, more than is usually given to literary criticism. That is why I have not undertaken it myself nor even, I am ashamed to admit, undertaken to read the book.

Why? Opportunity cost. It would take me a month or so to do the work and when I'm done there would be no place to publish it except here or as a working paper at the usual places (Adademia.edu, SSRN, or ResearchGate). That is to say no one would read it. So that's a month of time wasted. Not that I have a substantial readership for anything else I write. But I could have been doing other things in that month, things more useful to me. That's the opportunity cost.

Let me explain. On the one hand, chiasmic structure, which I prefer to call ring-form or ring-composition, is not new to me. On the contrary, I am quite familiar with it and have analyzed in 18 texts at last count (including films). It takes a fair amount of work. In each case I constructed a table in which I listed the elements in the text – scenes, incidents, whatever – and then analyzed the result to see if it exhibited ring-form.

To evaluate Ryan's analysis I would have to re-read each of the 26 plays he analyzed and perform an analysis myself. That's at least a day's word for each text. Then I would compare the results of my analysis with his. I have no idea how that would work out. But I don't see why, in principle, he cannot be right.

And if he is right, in all cases or even only a hand full or cases, then there is a sense in which Shakespeare critics don't know what they're talking about when they talk about those plays, for they don't have descriptive control over their materials. Is that an extreme judgement? Of course it is. I recognize that form isn't everything, but it is central. If the profession isn't prepared to describe and analyze form, which it isn't (though most critics would disagree with me on that, and they wouldn't be entirely wrong, but yes they would be wrong in a very important way), then it shouldn't make form and formalism central concepts in literary criticism.

The problem is not confined to Shakespeareans. It infects – is that the right word? maybe "afflicts"? what about misinforms? – nearly the whole profession.

* * * * *

Other posts on ring-form. See also, Journey into Shakespeare, a tedious adventure – Will the real Hamlet stand up?, where I discuss the possibility of examining the three extant texts for ring-form.

Symbols and Nets: Debriefing

It’s been several days since I’d uploaded my most recent run on “Kubla Khan” to the web: Symbols and Nets: Calculating Meaning in “Kubla Khan.” It feels like I’m done tweaking it, so it’s time for a debriefing.

• First I ask: If I’d read this paper early in my career, what would I have made of it? (Cf. Borges on the curious case of Menard and the Quixote.)
• Then: Just what did I mean when I said (to myself): It’s all over but the details?
• Finally, some further thoughts on the methodological postscript.

Would BB69 or BB72 Have Understood It?

Once we get past the introduction, which is in straight prose, the dialog containes six diagrams, all of them transparently derived from diagrams in my 1972 MA thesis, “THE ARTICULATED VISION: Coleridge's ‘Kubla Khan’.” There is relatively little in there about the work that I’ve done since then. Perhaps the most important bit is a phrase from a recent interview with Geoffrey Hinton, “big vectors of neural activity.” And there’s some computer tech stuff about addresses that I may not have known then. So why did it take me 50 years to write that dialog?

Could I have written it 10 years ago? Back then there wouldn’t have been that Hinton interview I alude to, nor would I have done all the thinking I’ve done about machine learning and artificial neural nets. None of that is in there, but it is implicit in what I wrote and why I wrote it. The same goes for all the cognitive network stuff I did with Dave Hays in the mid-1970s. For me, in 2022, that dialog implies a lot that I’ve learned over the course of half a century (has it been that long, really?). None of that would have been available to BB69 (Bill Benzon in 1969), before I’d written my thesis, or to BB72, after I’d written it.

BB72 would recognized the diagrams as his work, and would have been angry if they weren’t attributed to him – but in this counter-factual he would have been given full credit for them. BB72 certainly saw those nested trees as possible evidence of nested loops in some kind of computation, so I don’t know how he would have taken the concluding dismissal of that possibility. I should also say that BB72 was still somewhat under the influence of Chomsky and attempted to account for those trees with two re-write rules, like this:

T --> B + T + B
B --> B + B

But he didn’t take much satisfaction from them. They seemed rather empty.

I’m not sure what he would made of that dismissal, not do I think it matters. But I do think he would have found the dialog interesting. The question is, would having read it changed his next steps? He’d still have been curious about it all and still would have set off to graduate school with the intention of figuring it out. Would that dialog have changed how he went about it?

That’s hard to say. But what would have been available to him back in the 1970s? He had to work through computational semantics to learn that that wouldn’t solve that problem, though it allowed him to publish a paper about a Shakespare sonnet (129). Would reading that dialog have saved him from doing that? I doubt it. Besides, doing that work proved interesting and useful, just not for THAT problem. And knowing it wouldn’t solve THAT problem is itself useful.

Let’s ask a different question. Let’s bring BB72 forward into the present and have him read that dialog. Now what would he do? The possibilities before him are quite different, though access to that Old School cognitive science would have been tricky. Would he have looked at it? Who knows?

What about BB69? Let’s make it the summer of 1969, after he’d written a senior-year term paper on “Kubla Khan” and had become committed to working out a structuralist account of the poem, but had not yet worked through it to discovering the structure in those diagrams. He would certainly have checked the diagrams for himself. Beyond that, his situation isn’t much different from that of BB72, except that he hadn’t worked over the poem, time and again, until he finally gave up on the binary-structuralist analytic approach and he got the idea to check line-end punctuation. That’s the idea that led to those diagrams. What did BB72 learn from that work that BB69 hadn’t? Does it matter?

I’m not sure it does. BB69 would have verified those diagrams. And he’d certainly have gone looking for similar structures in other poems by Coleridge and then later, poems by other poets. He would have set out to do the kind of work that’s necessary to discovering those diagrams. That’s the important point.

So why haven’t other literary critics independently figured out how to do what BB70 had done?

It’s All Done but the Details

What the hell does that mean? I DON’T think it means that we’re on the edge of figuring out “Kubla Khan,” and by implication, a whole lot more. I DO think it means that if and when I decided to take another detailed look at the poem, I’ll come up with something interesting. Just what, I don’t know.

In my working paper, Calculating meaning in “Kubla Khan” – a rough cut, I had a this chart:

What we’re looking at is a combination of compositional concatenation and convolutional gestalting – this is not the place to explain what those might mean. But I think I will be able to say something about that process that I couldn’t have when I wrote the paper in 2017. Just what...we’ll see when I do it. But see the next section...

Methodology: Cathedrals and Building Materials

The point I was making in the postscript on method (pp. 18 ff.) can be exemplified like this: You’re a linguistic. You know everything there is to know about sentence-level linguistics (assuming, for the sake of argument, the the idea of a sentence is self-evidently useful), from phonetics and phonology up through syntax. But that’s not going to tell you how a connected discourse is put together. You can analyze each sentence-level string in the discourse but, when you’ve done that for the whole discourse, you still don’t know how and why the discourse was put together. That involves consideration that are invisible at the sentence level.

Now, does it make sense to investigate discourse level structure when you don’t have well-settled means of describing and analyzing sentence-level strings? Yes, why not? You just have to be careful how you do it. You want to construct your discourse accounts in terms that are at least commensurate with one or some sentence-level accounts.

That’s what I’m up to with “Kubla Khan.” I know that ultimately we’re going to have to have recourse to neuroscience in order to figure out what’s going on. But the neuroscientists haven’t got a clue about what’s going on in phenomena like “Kubla Khan.” So working at the level of the poem in terms that are commensurate, ultimately, with neuroscience, that’s tricky. Speculative. But someone’s got to do it. And it’s not like we’ve got to go straight to neuroscience in one fell swoop. There’s other levels of description and analysis available.

So, I’m interested in understanding a cathedral. You guys understand stone blocks, morter, and so forth. I’ve just got to keep an eye on what you’re up to while I’m thinking about the overall design. And you might want to look up every now and then to see where it’s going.

Criticism in an age of delirium: Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network

Once again I'm thinking about form, so I'm bumping this to the top of the queue, which is about a book that is NOT about literary form, though it pretends otherwise. That is, if literary texts are made up of words, and literary form is about the arrangement of words, then Levine's Forms is not about literary form because it has relatively little to say about the arrangement of words in texts, though it makes noises in that direction in the introduction. Rather it is about forms of social life and organization that can be represented in literature, which is interesting, but not a matter of literary form. FWIW, Derek Attridige is skeptical about the book on similar grounds.

* * * * *

I don’t know when I first learned of Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015), but it was some time after it had won the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize for an outstanding work of literary scholarship. That put it on my radar screen, the conjunction of form as its topic and winning the prize. I hoped, you know, for an actual discussion of form, but wasn’t really expecting one. Alas, my expectations were fulfilled, my hopes, not.

I read some of the book with great care, and even thought about writing a blog post or two explaining my misgivings. But this or that seemed more important and I simply forgot about the book. And then yesterday this showed up in my Twitter feed:

Thrilled to be part of this set of responses to Caroline Levine's Forms in new PMLA. My essay considers the use of sociological method in her argument about formal collision. Many thanks to @goldstoneandrew and @Ted_Underwood for help with the piece https://t.co/N4Y6JaKMs5

— Hoyt Long (@hoytlong) December 31, 2017

Not only was I reminded of the book, but I also learned that PMLA had devoted a symposium to it.

So I’ve decided to post, briefly.

The relationship between materiality and form has long been of interest in literary studies. Critics have often assumed that the materiality of a text’s content lends itself to certain literary forms: patterns of labor or rhythms of the body yielding certain repetitions in poetry, for example. [...] Literature is not made of the material world it describes or invokes but of language, which lays claims to its own forms—syntactical, narrative, rhythmic, rhetorical—and its own materiality—the spoken word, the printed page. And indeed, each of these forms and materials lays claim to its own a affordances—its own range of capabilities. Every literary form thus generates its own, separate logic. (p. 10)

Levine’s contrast between the materiality of a text’s content and its materiality as a string of words is promising. A bit later this theme continues:

I will make the case here that no form, however seemingly powerful, causes, dominates, or organizes all others. This means that literary forms can lay claim to an efficacy of their own. They do not simply reflect or contain prior political realities. As different forms struggle to impose their order on our experience, working at different scales of our experience, aesthetic and political forms emerge as comparable patterns that operate on a common plane. (p. 16)

And yet there is an ominous note here, politics. This is a book about politics, at least politics as it is understood by literary critics, which has only a tangential relationship with how politics works in the flesh-and-blood world.

Hence the title of this post, criticism in an age of delirium, an age where wish, desire, and dream are readily confused with reality. Only a literary critic would think that analyzing organizational forms (the “Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network” of Levine’s subtitle) as they appear in works of literary and video art is tantamount to examining them in the world of blood, sweat, tears, and rubber on the road; and only a literary critic would think that such conceptual analysis is a political act. No wonder the humanities are threatened; literary critics treat politics as form of ghost dancing [1].

I quite agree that literature is made of language, that each “form thus generates its own, separate logic” and that “literary forms can lay claim to an efficacy of their own”. But this is NOT a book about language and the forms it takes in literature. It is a book about ideas expressed in that language. And if it is not about the actual language of literature, how can it possibly speak about the “affordances”, the “capabilities”, or the “efficacy” of that language? This is a book that’s blind to its ostensible subject.

This is most obvious in its final chapter, devoted to The Wire, where Levine weaves together the forms she’d discussed in previous chapters: whole, rhythm, hierarchy, and network. The Wire, of course, is not a literary text; it’s a TV show and it ran for four seasons. There isn’t a single frame grab in the chapter. Moreover, it is easy to read the chapter and forget that it’s about a TV show, not a novel. The materiality of her text is irrelevant to Levine.

And that implies that she hasn’t the foggiest idea about the forms these texts take. She’s not interested in the texts, as such, but only in the worlds represented in those texts.

I suppose I could be accused of lacking critical generosity, criticizing Levine for failing for failing to do something she obviously has no interest in doing. So be it.

But it’s not really Levine that I’m criticizing. It’s the profession of academic literary criticism. There’s the source of failure. Within that circumscribed context this is an excellent book. In a way, it may even be a book of the highest and best kind, a book that remains within the established conceptual boundaries of the discipline while finding surprising new things to do within those boundaries. If academic literary criticism is to remain viable, however, those boundaries must be redrawn so that the profession no longer words in a state of epistemic delirium. I fear that the profession is incapable of doing this. It lacks the requisite self-awareness and honesty.

Alas, words do have meaning [2]. When you describe texts as being materially constituted of language, make that your subject, and then fail to attend to that very language, you are abusing language. The fact that this particular abuse is authorized within the profession doesn’t justify it. It simply papers over the problem. It’s a form of denial. Of delirium.

* * * * *

[1] See my old post, “Ghost Dancing in the USA”, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/05/ghost-dancing-in-usa.html

[2] I’m thinking of a Jerry Seinfeld bit, which I analyzed in “Seinfeld through the Donut Hole”, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2016/03/seinfeld-through-donut-hole.html

Things change, but sometimes they don’t: On the difference between learning about and living through [revising your priors and the way of the world]

This is a year old (first published in July 26 of last year). I'm bumping it to the top of the queue because I'm thinking about these things once again.

It has long been obvious to me that there is an epistemic difference between knowing history and living through history. I now have half a notion of how to think about this. That’s what this post is about.

I begin by talking about the effect the fall of the Soviet Union had on me. That’s my paradigm example of the phenomenon I’m talking about. Call it a RUPTURE in my sense of the world. Then I consider my intellectual career as a series of ruptures where I had to reconsider my priors, if you will, and so rethink my intellectual foundations. Finally I move to a graphics revolution that could have happened, SHOULD have happened, as a result to digital technology. I saw it coming, but it never really got started. What was I missing? I conclude with some reflections on the current situation.

 

I list five such ruptures in all. Three INSIDE my primary intellectual trajectory, my intellectual career, while two are OUTSIDE that trajectory, but nonetheless affected me.

World history and the fall of the Soviet Union

It’s about having to revise your priors – I’m talking Bayes, as least informally, your prior commitments. Living through events forces that on you, or at any rate, gives you the opportunity to revise those priors. Merely learning about the past doesn’t do that. Changing how you think is deeper than learning about change.

My paradigmatic example is the fall of the Soviet Union. I grew up in the 1950s and ‘60s, when the Cold War was going strong. I remember reading about how to construct bomb shelters, and thinking about where the family shelter should be. I remember talk of the missile gap; I remember the Cuban missile crisis. I fully expected to be living the Cold War when I died.

And then the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the Cold War was all but over. Though some had anticipated this – I’m thinking particularly of U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan – I certainly did not. It took me by surprise.

What did I learn from that? Simple, that The World can change. Sure, I knew world history, I knew that things changed deeply and fundamentally, time and time again. But I hadn’t seen it for myself. I suppose I might have taken that simple lesson from the Civil Rights movement, but perhaps the persistence of racism blunted that achievement. The end of the Vietnam War? No, and I’d marched against that one and been a conscientious objector.

It was the fall of the Soviet Union that reached me, that forced me to abandon a set of simple, but fundamental – I was about to type “epistemic”, “epistemic commitments”, but no, it’s deeper – ontological commitments. For me the Cold War had ontological force. It was simply the way of the world. I learned about it in childhood and lived it through a quarter century of adulthood.

And then the world changed.

Let’s call that an OUTSIDE RUPTURE in my sense of the world, outside because it was outside my primary sphere of action and commitment.

My intellectual life

My intellectual life has had a number of “ruptures”, if you will. In the late 1960s I learned to interpret literary texts as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. I was trained in so-called “close reading”, but was interested in structuralist analysis as well. In the spring of my senior year I became interested in “Kubla Khan.” I decided to undertake a structuralist analysis of the poem for a master’s thesis.

Worksheet, first 36 lines of "Kubla Khan"

As things worked out that project fell apart in 1970 or ‘71. “Kubla Khan” refused to submit to the methods I applied to it. My commitment to the poem won out and I was forced to abandon those methods. I tell the story in considerable autobiographical detail in “Touchstones” [1] and supply the intellectual detail in a working paper on Lévi-Strauss [2].

FIRST INSIDE RUPTURE, inside because it is dead center in my primary sphere of action and commitment. I could no longer believe that existing methods of literary criticism were adequate to the task of understanding how literary texts work. New methods, incidentally, that required visual thinking. Standard literary criticism has been and remains committed to expository prose as its fundamental intellectual medium.

In 1973 I went off to get a Ph. D. in the English Department at SUNY at Buffalo and ended up spending considerable time studying computational semantics with David Hays in the Linguistics Department. My dissertation ended up as a quasi-technical exercise in cognitive semantics as applied to literature, one where, for large sections, I drew the diagrams first and then wrote prose to explain them. In 1976 Hays and I published a humanities-oriented review of computational linguistics in which we proposed the development of symbolic systems capable of “reading” a Shakespeare play in an intellectually interesting way [3]. I fully expected to be working with such a system later in my career. That hasn’t happened, nor do I expect it to.

Part of a semantic network for Shakespeare's Sonnet 129

SECOND INSIDE RUPTURE. Symbolic computational systems are not adequate for understanding the mind.

But this was not so drastic as that first inside rupture. For one thing, Hays and I didn’t really believe that symbolic systems were adequate to the task. We’d been exploring how to ground them in analog systems and in distributed neural computation [4]. The failure, rather, was one of degree rather than kind. I had overestimated the power of symbolic systems. I would later pick up my interest in neural systems in conversations I had with the late Walter Freeman and I incorporated into the early chapters of my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil (2001) [5].

I suppose there was a THIRD INSIDE RUPTURE, or quasi-rupture, as well. In 1995 I discovered that a bunch of literary scholars was interested in “the cognitive revolution” – you know, the ideas I’d begun investigating in graduate school. That was in the Stanford Humanities Review. My work was forgotten but, and more importantly, computation was nowhere to be seen in this newer. Their version of cognitive science was thus very different from mine. It was in working through that difference that I figured out that I had been chasing form all along.