SF, Literature. Recently found solar punk. Lover of J G Ballard, Virginia Woolf. Nonfiction on a range of topics including brain science and lit. theory.
@paulusm@scholar.social
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An extraordinarily intimate memoir of the near death experiences that have made Maggie O'Farrell the …
Some amazing life experiences here, many of which explain her incredible fiction writing.
Zunshine draws on a range of classic international literature to illustrate the history and development of intersubjectivity (levels of 'embedment' of mental states) in the novel. I enjoyed the way in which better known examples were mixed in with the lesser known or overlooked, and the way she used examples which ostensibly had no embedding to illustrate how it can be cleverly implicit (eg between the author and reader as much as between characters).
I got a bit bogged down in the chapter considering examples from ancient Chinese novels, perhaps as it takes extra effort to interpret her reading of the cognitive aspects of a story. But really enjoyed the final chapter on children's lit about the interesting questions it raises - for instance, is it better to spell out the psychological aspects of a plot or let the child figure them out on their own?
A guide for using computational text analysis to learn about the social world
Found this to be a useful overview of current text analytic approaches and applications. There is a strong emphasis on reliability and validity while understanding that theory does not always precede experiment. I liked the way the phases of analysis are broken down and the use of example studies to illustrate different methods. There were some quite technical sections but again the examples helped in understanding these.
This book left me awestruck at the depth of scholarship and the attention to detail shown by Cohn - She takes previously ill-defined narrative styles and carefully differentiates and delineates them through detailed use of examples. Her insight into the texts themselves and the way they succeed or struggle in portraying the underlying consciousness of the characters is fantastic.