The Values in Numbers by Hoyt Long

Author:Hoyt Long
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT008030, Literary Criticism/Asian/Japanese, LIT007000, Literary Criticism/Books & Reading
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

INFLUENCE AHEAD OF ITS TIME

To be clear, what the Japanese model of SOC provides, as with the English model, is the ability to test whether a particular constellation of empirical features is expressed with any consistency in works written contemporaneous with, and after, the documented arrival of SOC as a formal technique. One reason to do this is to ensure that the radical formal break the model designates is not simply a product of general linguistic and stylistic drift. Literary language moved fast in this period, especially as each new generation sought to overturn the achievements of the previous one, and it is necessary to test whether experiments with SOC look equally distinctive to the model when compared with the other kinds of writing happening around it. The second reason is to generate an account of the afterlife of SOC to see where the model’s judgments do or do not align with the stories that have been told about its lasting impact on Japanese letters. To generate such an account is simultaneously to return to the question of our willingness, as historians and critics, to put its judgments about textual equivalence in dialogue with those achieved by other means. What, ultimately, can this algorithmic competence offer once we allow it to roam beyond the texts that writers and critics have already diagnosed as the likeliest sites for the reception and mutation of SOC?

In order to address the first rationale, I repeat the procedure used for the I-novel and “pure literature” corpora with a corpus of thirty titles published between 1924 and 1937. It includes writing by several high-brow authors (e.g., Tōson, Akutagawa, Hayashi Fumiko), authors affiliated with the proletarian movement (e.g., Sata Ineko, Hayama Yoshiki, Hirabayashi Taiko), and popular authors of detective fiction in both its “mainstream” (honkaku) and “deviant” (henkaku) modes (e.g., Edogawa Ranpō, Hamao Shirō, Yumeno Kyūsaku). When SOC passages were compared to these more contemporary works, the full model classified at the passage level with 92 percent accuracy, averaging to about 97 percent accuracy at the work level. From the model’s perspective, SOC is nearly as easy to distinguish from contemporary writing as from older works, suggesting that linguistic or stylistic drift is not a confounding variable. The only significant difference is that the presence of onomatopoeia is no longer a distinguishing feature, implying that these words were distributed across contemporary writing in such a way that any meaningful difference with SOC passages is leveled out. The other four discriminating features (TTR, nominalized sentences, neologism, and ellipses) continue to signal in the same direction with similar strength, with only the neologism feature weakening slightly in its predictive power. Also notable is that two works by Yokomitsu, “Kikai” (Machine, 1930) and “Muchi” (Whip, 1931), look more like SOC from this comparative viewpoint. Both are marked by a distinct turn toward representing radical interiority and away from the fragmented sentences and montage techniques of his earlier writing.76

That the model should, with slight variations, continue to discriminate SOC so well is both instructive and concerning.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.