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28 June 2012

Beauty or Power? The Riddle of Literary Quality. Karina van Dalen-Oskam, Andreas van Cranenburgh. 28 June 2012. /. Beauty or Power?.

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28 June 2012

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  1. Beauty or Power? The Riddle of Literary Quality Karina van Dalen-Oskam, Andreas van Cranenburgh 28 June 2012

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  3. Beauty or Power? 'The beauty party, which dominated literary criticism for centuries, assumes that the status of a great book is a function of certain aesthetic qualities inherent in the work. (…) Aspects portrayed by followers of the beauty party as objective or inter-subjective aesthetic qualities, are regarded by followers of the power party as qualities agreed upon by a specific cultural elite; (…) what was presented as a quality - or qualities - inherent to the literary work, is unmasked as an outcome of institutionalized modes of interpretation'. (David Fishelov, Dialogues with/and great books. The dynamics of canon formation)

  4. Empirical research Power: attention to works in encyclopedias, amount of mentions on the internet, number of publications in certain literary journals, etc. Beauty: empirical research is still very scarce. This is what will be done in The Riddle of Literary Quality. Expectation: a mix of both

  5. Main research question • Do modern novels which are considered to be 'literary' show differences in high and low level patterns when compared to novels which are considered to be 'not very literary' and if they do, in what areas do they differ? (And the same for ‘good’ versus ‘bad’.)

  6. First deliverable of the project • Deliverable: A list of formal characteristics and their distribution in a corpus of Modern Dutch novels according to how the novels are valued by readers. • Method: Correlating the occurrence of formal characteristics measured with innovative text-analystical tools with the opinions of readers.

  7. Survey of readers • Respondents are asked several questions to establish their most common reader role (‘information and fun’ or ‘aesthetic pleasure’) • Respondents are asked to score books they have read on two scales: • Very bad --- very good • Not very ‘literary’ --- very ‘literary’ • If they want, they can also score books they have not read but have clear opinions about (in a separate part of the survey) • Books to score are taken from a list of 400 novels based on recent CPNB Top-100s

  8. Focus of the formal analysis • The values for the features figuring in the first deliverable will be extracted from those books which many readers with the same reading role agree on as being • highly literary and good highly literary and bad not very literary and good not very literary and bad

  9. Examples of formal features • Sentence length, word length, amount of syllables per word, lexical richness (amount of different words used), amount of difficult words used, distributions of parts of speech, amount of dialogue, • …….. • Narrative structure, topic use and distribution, syntactic complexity. First research is being done on the last of these.

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