Before the development (let alone the use) of a tool, first comes the identification of its need; its scope, in other words. As an academic with research interests revolving around the Gothic and science fiction, and with some rudimentary programming experience, I had a crazy idea. Most great ideas come as a result of madness and boredom, I suppose, and my idea was one just like that. What if, I thought, I made a simple program that could detect certain patterns in Gothic and science fiction? In other words, what if I made a literature computer analysis program that could help me create a taxonomy of the texts I’m researching?
Can a computer program help with literary analysis? (Yes!)
Authorial intention must be among the most perverse – yes, perverse – things in connection with literary criticism. By the term “authorial intention” we mean, self-evidently, what the author’s intention was when writing a certain piece of work.
In other words, authorial intention refers to expressing a meaning the writer intended. For many people, there really isn’t any mystery: Writer A wrote book B, therefore the meaning expressed in book B is what writer A intended. However, as we will see in more detail further below, this is an excessively simplistic approach.
Problems begin once we realize that there never really is only one reader. Again, this might appear as self-evident, but it is important to emphasize the repercussions: Are we really certain that reader C and reader D have interpreted book B in the same (or even similar) manner?
Indeed, even the same reader can have two different responses to the same book on a subsequent reading. Think of a book you loved as a teenager – let’s assume, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Think of the second time you read that book, perhaps years later. Some things didn’t feel as interesting, while others you discovered for the first time. You had two readerly responses, being one individual, for the same book.
Chaos, meaning, and authorial intention. What’s the connection?(more…)
2018 is the year that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein turns 200. What could possibly be the connection between one of the core works of the Gothic canon and the #MeToo campaign? Allow me to begin with a little story.
It was a fittingly dark and dreary day, typical of Finnish autumns. My Gothic fiction students and I began our discussion on Frankenstein. As it usually happens in such cases, people enter the discussion with certain preconceptions, only to see them shattered. That’s a good thing. As an educator, you want people (yourself included) to discover something new. We had talked about most of the usual elements touched upon by literary criticism. We’d discussed about the connection between Frankenstein and identity, aspects of ethnicity and “race”, morality, nature and the sublime, and others.
Mary Shelley’s novel is a story replete with symbolism
