17.479 new books: narratology; visualistics

From: Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk)
Date: Sat Dec 20 2003 - 03:15:49 EST

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                   Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 479.
           Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                       www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                            www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                         Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu

             Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2003 08:06:12 +0000
             From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
             Subject: new books

    Humanists will be interested in the following two new books, both German
    Habilitationsschriften published in English:

    Jan Christoph Meister, Computing Action: A Narratological Approach (Berlin:
    Walter de Gruyter, 2003).

    >Computing Action takes a new approach to the phenomenon of narrated action
    >in literary texts. It begins with a survey of philosophical approaches to
    >the concept of action, ranging from analytical to transcendental and
    >finally constructivist definitions. This leads to the formulation of a new
    >model of action, in which the core definitions developed in traditional
    >structuralist narratology and Greimassian semiotics are reconceptualised
    >in the light of constructivist theories.
    >
    >In the second part of the study, the combinatory model of action proposed
    >is put into practice in the context of a computer-aided investigation of
    >the action constructs logically implied by narrative texts. Two
    >specialised literary computing tools were developed for the purposes of
    >this investigation of textual data: EVENTPARSER, an interactive tool for
    >parsing events in literary texts, and EPITEST, a tool for subjecting the
    >mark-up files thus produced to a combinatory analysis of the episode and
    >action constructs they contain. (The software tools and all relevant data
    >files will be provided for download on the de Gruyter website).
    >
    >The third part of the book presents a case study of Goethe’s
    >Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten. Here, the practical application
    >of theory and methodology eventually leads to a new interpretation of
    >Goethe’s famous Novellenzyklus as a systematic experiment in the narrative
    >construction of action – an experiment intended to demonstrate not only
    >Goethe’s aesthetic principles, but also, and more fundamentally, his
    >epistemological convictions.

    (See the listing at
    http://www.degruyter.com/rs/bookSingle.cfm?id=IS-3110176289-1&l=E.)

    Jörg R. J. Schirra, Variations and Application Conditions for the Data Type
    "Image": The Foundation of Computational Visualistics (2003, at
    http://www.computervisualistik.de/~schirra/Work/Projects/Habilitation/).

    Yours,
    WM

    Dr Willard McCarty | Senior Lecturer | Centre for Computing in the
    Humanities | King's College London | Strand | London WC2R 2LS || +44 (0)20
    7848-2784 fax: -2980 || willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk
    www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/



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