italian-studies: Scholarly discussions in any field of Italian studies
Dear colleagues,
We are glad to announce the upcoming online research seminar in the context of the PRIN 2022 PNRR Project "MITE (Make It Explicit: Documenting Interpretations of Literary Fictions)":
April 17, 2024, 10:00-12:00 CET:
Fotis JANNIDIS (Julius Maximilians Universität Würzburg, DE). Modeling attributes of literary characters
ABSTRACT: Figures are a central topic of research in computational literary studies. However, the relevant research differs significantly from research in the field of narratology. On the one hand, this is due to the different affordances of these approaches: certain aspects of literary characters could be analyzed more easily with computational methods than others – and that makes it more obvious that the same is true for the narratological analysis, but these praxeological aspects are seldom reflected. So, the different affordances of the different approaches emphasize different aspects as 'obvious'. On the other hand, the work in the CLS is subject to the conditions of an empirical framework: Concepts are under much more plausibility pressure due to sub-steps such as annotation by several annotators and the calculation of the interannotator agreement, the demands of operationalizability as well as the application to very many texts. To discuss the tension between the two approaches, the starting point for my presentation is therefore my own pragmatic model of the character in narrative texts, according to which a character can be described as a mental model of a model reader, which is built up in the course of a text via a semiotic process of attribute aggregation. A character description in this sense is then confronted with the model of the character based on the analytical perspectives of CLS, which highlights acts of communication or cooccurrences in the same text span. In this perspective characters are most of all entities described by the entities linked with them in a social network, while attributes are much rarer in texts. The question is what kind of theoretical assumptions would allow us to integrate these two perspectives into one framework.
Alberto VOLTOLINI (University of Turin, IT). What Makes a Version of a Work a Version of That Work?
ABSTRACT: There are two main ways of individuating fictional works. A first one is Meinongian: fictional works are sets of propositions that involve fictional characters (e.g. Zalta 1983). A second one is artefactualist: a fictional work is a composition that traces back to its moment of origin and its author’s intentions (Thomasson 1999). To me, the first way is preferable, for it enables to provide an ontological proof concerning the existence, in the overall realm of beings, of fictional characters (Voltolini 2006). Yet, it has a consequence that for some is unpleasant: the identity conditions of a fictional work are so rigid that if one changes a single proposition of such a work, one obtains a different work. As a further result, it seems to turn out that different versions of one and the same work are simply different works, since they involve such a change. In this talk, I will try to dispense with this further implication by relying on the identity of games of make-believe that underlie the generation of fictional characters. Appealing to this identity will hopefully explain why different versions of a work are indeed more intimate to each other than versions of different works.
To participate, please fill out the following form: http://tiny.cc/miteform. The link will be sent a couple of days before the seminar. For further details on the project please visit https://www.loa.istc.cnr.it/mite/.
Best wishes,
Gaia Tomazzoli & the MITE Team
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