Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 393.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
Date: 2025-03-08 13:31:12+00:00
From: William Benzon <bbenzon@mindspring.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 38.391: on computational literary criticism & a conversation with Claude 3.7
And I’m equally sorry because you clearly did not read the paper itself and know
nothing of the extensive work I’ve done on the actual analysis and description
of formal properties of texts.
If you’d read the paper you’d see that I wasn’t emphasizing the use of LLMs in
actual analysis but rather saying that it provides something of an “existence
proof” that linguistic form (in general) is computational in nature and
therefore that the idea of computation is useful in guiding the analysis and
description of the formal properties of texts.
Though I don’t quote the following passage in my paper, I do cite the article in
which it occurs:
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. Georg Lukács inaugurated modern literary
theory with a collection of essays called Soul and Form, a title that would be
impossible today unless it were for a critical reflection on jazz. Among
theorists preoccupied with form, there is a recurrent conflict between
nonformalist and formalist conceptions of form: Bahktin as against Shklovsky;
Jameson as against Frye; or the Barthes of S/Z over against the Barthes of
“Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative.” 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 polarity between Clark’s appeal
to human-sensuous activity and Macpherson’s call for a conception of form that
holds good even on the assumption of human extinction suggests the philosophical
extremities to which the question of form gives rise. So, too, the polarity
between the richly historical texture of formal analysis in Jones, Martin, and
Butterfield and the radically formalist analysis of Jarvis exemplifies how
critical practice, not definition, is where the question of form is most
fruitfully fought out.
That’s from: Frances Ferguson, John Brenkman, Introduction, ELH, Volume 82, No.
2, Summer 2015, pp. 313-318, DOI: 10.1353/elh.2015.0014.
Given the widespread confusion about form, along with equally wide-spread
confusion about what a text is (where I do quote a passage, again from ELH) how
can the discipline possibly have a systematic and thorough approach to the
analysis and description of form? Not meaning, but form.
Bill Benzon
> On Mar 8, 2025, at 2:40 AM, Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
>
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 391.
> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
> Hosted by DH-Cologne
> www.dhhumanist.org
> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
> Date: 2025-03-07 15:58:31+00:00
> From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 38.390: pubs: on computational literary
criticism & a conversation with Claude 3.7
>
> I'm sorry, but the description of literary analysis below is ridiculously
> reductive and seems to ignore the work that criticism has been doing since
> at least the 1970s. It sounds frankly ignorant, especially in the field of
> poetics, which in my opinion involves the closest reading of human writing
> possible.
>
> Furthermore, analysis provided by Large Language Models cannot by their
> nature be any kind of a substitute for a close reading of a text, much less
> a substitute for the variety of kinds of criticism made possible under the
> heading of "literary theory." I don't trust LLMs to manage polysemy unless
> individual words are coded separately for different senses or definitions
> of the same word, much less for multiple definitions operating at the same
> time in the same instance of use. My impression is that LLMs would flatten
> the meaning of texts rather than open them up unless some kind of close
> reading work is done ahead of time to account for polysemy.
>
> But that kind of work would pre-interpret the text behind the scenes
> without explanation.
>
> Rather than trying to replace theoretical approaches with LLMs, it might be
> more productive to think in terms of the kinds of interpretive work that is
> possible with LLMs -- in terms of value added.
>
> Jim R
>
> On Fri, Mar 7, 2025 at 1:45 AM Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 390.
>> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
>> Hosted by DH-Cologne
>> www.dhhumanist.org
>> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Date: 2025-03-06 09:28:32+00:00
>> From: William Benzon <bbenzon@mindspring.com>
>> Subject: Computation, Text, and Form in Literary Criticism: A
>> Conversation with Claude 3.7
>>
>> That’s the title of a paper I recently posted. Here’s the abstract:
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> You can download it here:
>>
>> Academia.edu:
>>
>>
https://www.academia.edu/128029987/Computation_Text_and_Form_in_Literary_Criti
> cism_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_Tex
>> t_and_Form_in_Literary_Criticism_A_Conversation_with_Claude_37
>>
<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/389591524_Computation_Text_and_Form_
> in_Literary_Criticism_A_Conversation_with_Claude_37>
>>
>>
>>
>> William Benzon
>> bbenzon@mindspring.com
>> 917.717.9841
>
>
> --
> Dr. James Rovira <http://www.jamesrovira.com/>
>
> - *David Bowie and Romanticism
> <https://jamesrovira.com/2022/09/02/david-bowie-and-romanticism/>*,
> Palgrave Macmillan, 2022
> - *Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism
> <https://www.routledge.com/Women-in-Rock-Women-in-Romanticism-The-
> Emancipation-of-Female-Will/Rovira/p/book/9781032069845>*,
> Routledge, 2023
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