Literary Investigations
The Divine Dante - Canon Builder or Revolutionary Thinker? : For a Reflection on Identity, Minority, and Classics View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Annalisa Maria Guzzardi
Dante’s linguistic research has long been studied in terms of a literary and linguistic attempt of canon formation that led him to become the “father of Italian language”. However, what about focusing on the revolutionary power of Dante’s determination to raise the vernacular to the status of poetic language of the highest subject? What are its implications, as far as politics and identity are concerned? Indeed, we have to consider that, even if in Dante’s time the vernacular was the most spoken language, it was a minority one in terms of poetry, not worthy of elevated literary undertaking. Then, what this life-long linguistic experimentation tells us about the poet’s life? This paper looks into these questions and explores issues of linguistic identity from the point of view of the exiled poet, along with the dichotomy between Dante as canon builder and revolutionary thinker. We conduct a reflection about Dante being an intellectual and linguistic theorist who reshape traditional rules opening them to modernity, and Dante becoming a classic of world literary tradition. In order to carry out this investigation, we provide an overview of Dante’s works in Latin and vernacular, then analyzing linguistic theory as exposed in the De vulgari eloquentia, to finally look more specifically into the plurilingualism and pluristylism of the Commedia, which he engages in after abandoning the DVE’s project. This leads us to consider Dante’s overarching scope as plural minority author and essential part of the canon at the same time.
The Potential of Literary Cartography and Quantitative Methods for Literary Studies View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Richard Zmelik
This study focuses on the issue of literary cartography, especially its current manifestations in the environment of digital tools (digital literary cartography). Specifically, I consider several current research projects in which I primarily reflect not only on their methodologies for mapping artistic literature, the technological approaches to dealing with such mapping, but above all on the potential that these approaches and projects have for literary scholarship. At the same time, I present my own research (project), which focuses on mapping Prague's fictional topography in 19th century Czech prose. The ultimate goal of this project is to compile just such a literary cartographic database as an important part of the literary corpus of 19th century Czech texts. In this section of the paper I describe the structure of the corpus, its tools, and in particular demonstrate, through a small example, the possibilities of combining literary cartographic models with quantitative models resulting from corpus analysis.
Chinese Online Fiction: A New Romantic Imagination View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jie Lu
This paper is based on a study of Chinese online romantic fiction that emerged with the development of online literature and intensified beginning in the late twentieth century. Millions of readers, hundreds of thousands of writers, and numerous literary platforms have helped to develop online literature into a multi-billion literary industry, which has also exerted heavy influence on the mainstream culture in their close collaboration with production of films and TV dramas. Moreover, in producing and stimulating fan culture, it has changed the modes of writing, reading, and the author-reader relationship. This paper will focus on the development of a distinct romantic type set in ancient times that combines elements from classical/modern Chinese romantic traditions, shares some generic conventions of (western) popular romance, and incorporates different genres and fantastic mode to embody a new romantic imagination. As non-mimetic fiction, it constructs a highly fantastic universe as a self-contained, historically non-existent world, either an alternative to the ‘real’ ancient world or a parallel to modern world; yet, with embedded modern ideals, values, and consciousnesses as the confrontational substructure, this romantic imagination also taps into the contemporary cultural/social aspirations.
Toward Livable Futures: New Directions in Interdisciplinary Humanities Research
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gregory Shupak
This paper’s purpose is to investigate how the humanities might help build more livable futures. My method is to examine the ways that interdisciplinary approaches to literary studies and media studies could nurture conceptual frameworks capable of responding to global crises like the climate emergency and war, particularly amid the increasing risk of a nuclear conflagration. Among the texts my paper discusses are Ewa Domańska’s, “Prefigurative Humanities,” Yoshihisa Kashima’s, “Cultural Dynamics for Sustainability,” James Purdon’s, “Literature—Technology—Media,” and Fern Thompsett’s, “Pedagogies of Resistance.” I contend that the humanities must address the present conjuncture by employing what Domańska calls “future-oriented humanities . . . guided by the idea of critical hope and epistemic justice (understood as the inclusion of knowledges created in ‘epistemic peripheries’).” These “epistemic peripheries,” I argue, include sites of knowledge production such as alternative media outlets, independent literary presses, social movements, and free universities. The latter can be especially generative incubators of liberatory thought considering their capacity to, as Thompsett writes, foster “emancipatory praxes through ‘prefiguration’ - that is, building better worlds in the here-and-now through ongoing experimentation.” If humanities research prioritizes engaging with these “epistemic peripheries,” it might be possible to, in Kashima’s words, “develop cultures of sustainability that highlight and reward the ideas and practices that will help us transition to a sustainable lifestyle,” one that is necessarily also characterized by peace. Adopting such directions for humanities studies could enable ways of knowing, and of making knowledge, suitable to this century’s most urgent challenges.
