In discussing the practical consequences of literary theory, Stanley Fish points out that they are inexistent, because theory can never be united with practice, as it is actually impossible to separate theory from practice – a similar observation made by Steven Knapp and Walter B. Therefore, the historical “regime of relevance” (Galin Tihanov) makes possible a peculiar (use of) theory: an instrument that translates the ideology becomes the very essence of the determinist theory on the language in a totalitarian state.
The sufferer and the witness metacritic full#
Newspeak is full of problematic aspects: ideology shapes the language by means of “wooden language” (la langue de bois, in Françoise Thom’s terms). Also, the possibility of identifying an Orwellian model as opposed to the Sapir-Whorf and the linguistic models deserves examination.
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The case study carried out here concerns an exemplary novel, Ninety Eighty-Four by George Orwell, observing how the literary discourse can display a confrontation between two linguistic models, each resulted from a different theory: “instrumentalism” (Winston Smith) and “determinism” (O’ Brien). The paper focuses on the relationships between theory and practice and the consequences of dislocating theory from practice as they are illustrated through fiction. Therefore, the main focus of my paper is to re-discuss the subversive formula of the novels of the ‘obsessive decade’ in the ’70s, from a different and innovative point of view, within a quantitative approach. In the ’70s, the novels of the ‘obsessive decade’ were viewed as subversive by censorship and by literary criticism. One of the decrees of the Communist Party, proposed in 1964 due to the installation of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s totalitarian regime, was to develop a critique of the dogmatism of the ’50s. In the political context of the ’70s, due to the imposing of certain restrictions (we are referring to the July Thesis of 1971), the situation of Romanian literature changed. We will focus on how the subversive nature of the novels of the ‘obsessive decade’ can be detected through quantitative analysis of textual structures (thematic, lexis). This paper attempts to investigate the prevalence of the novels of the ‘obsessive decade’ in the ’70s, using the means of the quantitative studies and macroanalysis, as they are theorised by Franco Moretti and Matthew L. Finally, the last part of the study tackles the main challenges of developing a digital corpus of a local literature and the shortcomings related to this literature’s “locality” in terms of computational approaches and the compatibility of the tools developed by Western research projects. The second part will take a more theoretic approach to some of the key concepts related to data supported literary history. The first part of the study undertakes a succinct state-of-the-art on past and ongoing endeavours concerned with digital approaches to the study of Romanian literature, their initial findings and potential. The following paper attempts to survey the main research projects that deal with the computational analysis of Romanian literature in general and the Romanian novel in particular.
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While quantitative analysis employed lexicographical instruments such as dictionaries and literary chronologies, computational analysis tried to approach the issue from a “data rich” historical perspective (Katherine Bode), while also attempting to build a digital corpus adapted to computational methods. In recent years, Romanian literary studies took one of its major methodological turns toward distant reading, using either or both quantitative and computational analysis.