Our work is a first step towards incorporating natural language processing into literary criticism.",Ĭasting Light on Invisible Cities: Computationally Engaging with Literary Criticism Additionally, we compare results of our computational approach to similarity judgments generated by human readers.
Anthology ID: N19-1130 Volume: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers) Month: June Year: 2019 Address: Minneapolis, Minnesota Venue: NAACL SIG: Publisher: Association for Computational Linguistics Note: Pages: 1291–1297 Language: URL: DOI: 10.18653/v1/N19-1130 Bibkey: wang-iyyer-2019-casting Copy Citation: BibTeX MODS XML Endnote More options… PDF: = "s description and use unsupervised methods to cluster these embeddings. Our work is a first step towards incorporating natural language processing into literary criticism. Due to the unique structure of this novel, we can computationally weigh in on this debate: we leverage pretrained contextualized representations to embed each city’s description and use unsupervised methods to cluster these embeddings. Calvino has provided a classification of these cities into eleven thematic groups, but literary scholars disagree as to how trustworthy his categorization is. While most previous work focuses on “distant reading” by algorithmically discovering high-level patterns from large collections of literary works, here we sharpen the focus of our methods to a single literary theory about Italo Calvino’s postmodern novel Invisible Cities, which consists of 55 short descriptions of imaginary cities. Applying natural language processing methods to aid in such literary analyses remains a challenge in digital humanities. Since "lightening" is presumably about language, I think that a close reading of Calvino's language is the best way to understand what Calvino is doing.Abstract Literary critics often attempt to uncover meaning in a single work of literature through careful reading and analysis. I think the best way to do that would be through a close reading of either a passage by Calvino or a passage by a different author that uses similar ideas. But second, I would appreciate if someone could show, rather than tell, what the concept of "lightening" really is. First, I would appreciate an explanation of the many concepts Welsh used in his paper. So while Welsh perhaps showed that lightening was a goal of Calvino's, Welsh, in my mind, didn't show that it was something Calvino actually achieved. But given that Welsh started out with a philosophical critique of the idea of language, it seemed to me that there was very little analysis of the specific language, the words, the order of the words, the punctuation, the rythm, etc.
Welsh argued that lightening was a goal of Calvino, and to the extent that I understand Welsh's arguments, it seems like Welsh was successful. But the analysis was in very broad strokes. Welsh analyzes several passages written by Calvino to look for evidence of lightness. I'm now going to do something I prefer to avoid I'm going to criticize Welsh's argument despite not fully understanding it. Up to this point, if there have been any misunderstandings of Welsh's points, the blame lies with me.
But this is something I have no familiarity with, so I could very easily be missing the point.
As I understood it, "lightening" is about exactness, and describing things with as little language as possible. Welsh argues that Calvino overcomes this using a strategy Welsh refers to as "lightening". It's also confusing because Welsh uses the phrases "violence of representation" and "crisis of representation", and I'm not entirely sure what the difference is. Note that this is a topic I know little to nothing about, so its very possible that I'm misunderstanding important detail(s).
The mere act of writing is violent in that it robs experience of its true meaning. As I understood it, "violence of representation" refers to the idea that words are incapable of describing the "totality of experience" (Welsh). The paper is about the "violence of representation" and how this concept relates to Calvino's writing. I've read and enjoyed Calvino's Invisible Cities, but I wouldn't consider myself an expert by any means.
Violence of Representation" by John Welsh ( which you can read for free online). I'm reading the paper "Erasing the Invisible Cities: Italo Calvino and the