Friday, June 10, 2011

Computer analysis of fiction

I'm wondering if maybe this kind of misses the point of reading fiction.
Alicia
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4 comments:

green_knight said...

It's not literary analysis as we know it, but most writers I know do similar things. I've marked up texts with the balance between dialogue/description/action/internalisation because I felt that someone else's writing worked much better than mine; and things like asking how much screentime a character gets etc are common questions that help me to understand how an author is creating a certain efect. I have a novel with a main character who doesn't turn up until 2/3rds into the book; so I looked at how other authors kept people in the reader's mind without their physical presence.

All Moretti is doing is codyfing it and working on a much larger scale. The conclusions that he draws will still have to come out of his own understanding.

June 11, 2011 at 10:03 AM
Edittorrent said...

Something about this quantitative analysis makes me think of mid-century structuralists trying to escape the binary analysis. Not sure it's entirely workable. I mean, look at the way he references Aristotle and Forster before dismissing their models. But why does Horatio's consistent presence mean that he's neither a protagonist nor a secondary character, neither flat nor round? Neither character classification system points to time on the page, but rather to impact on the page. Different issues altogether.

T

June 11, 2011 at 11:45 AM
Adrian. said...

The best "network theory plot analysis" ever.

It's pretty geeky, but I found that when I did something similar for the plot of my work in progress (a mystery), I uncovered and fixed several plotting flaws.

June 11, 2011 at 7:08 PM
Edittorrent said...

I think it's interesting, but I think all sorts of things are interesting. :) I wonder if it's more useful for writers than readers?

In the end, there's magic. I can't get past that-- sometimes writers just have magic on the page, and we can analyze it, but we can't replicate it.

A

June 11, 2011 at 10:20 PM

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