MODELLING THE TEXT: IURII LOTMAN'S INFORMATION-THEORETIC APPROACH REVISITED . DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University by Andrei I. Cretu, M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 2008 Dissertation Committee Approved by: Professor Irene Masing-Delic, Adviser Professor Charles Gribble ______________________________ Professor Daniel Collins Adviser Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures Graduate Program ABSTRACT The interdisciplinary effervescence of the 1960's-1970's resulted in the adoption of terms like "information," "entropy" and "code" into linguistic and literary analysis; one of the schools that contributed to this tendency was the Soviet semiotics school, represented by scholars like Iurii Lotman, Boris Uspenskii, Viacheslav Ivanov & al. This dissertation offers a critical examination of the controversial and problematic aspects of the interdisciplinary connection between information theory and semiotics, concentrating on Iurii Lotman's works on the theory of the text. In order to address the question of the applicability and relevance of information-theoretic principles to text analysis, this dissertation proposes (a) to offer a concise statement of the basic terms and concepts of information theory; (b) to offer an understanding of how "structure" in the linguistic sense can be related to the concepts of information theory; (c) to evaluate Lotman's use of information-theoretic terminology against the scientific "standard"; (d) to develop an understanding of what, in information theory, could be relevant to the analysis of texts and in what way it is possible to approach texts as informational objects; (e) to offer a few practical examples of how certain features of the text viewed as an informational object can be used, within the limits of their definition, to support and to complement traditional methodologies of text analysis. ii The central claims that emerge from my theoretical investigation are (a) that the formalism of information theory is not compatible with Iurii Lotman's theory of the text (partly due to terminological ambiguities already present in the field) and that the attached terminology has been used in ways unrelated to the assumptions and results of information theory; (b) that the formalism of information theory does provide the basic elements for an approach to structure in the most general sense and that these elements can be made relevant to both linguistic description and text analysis; (c) that it is possible to formulate a coherent approach to the text as an informational object by taking into account the statistical, distributional properties of the discrete variables that can be defined on the text at its various structural levels; (d) that it is possible to use these properties to characterize the specifics of the language of a text and its relationships to other texts, and therefore to guide, and add coherence to, the application of traditional approaches to the text. The second part of my dissertation is dedicated to applying the theoretical considerations of the first part to the analysis of texts chosen from 20-th century Russian literature. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank my adviser, Prof. Irene Masing-Delic, whose advice, direction and expertise were essential in the process of writing this dissertation. In particular, I am thankful for her help in addressing what was the most challenging part of my research - that of making the results of the theoretical investigation relevant to issues of current interest in the study of literature. She made considerable efforts in ensuring that my dissertation maintained its coherence and accuracy and along with scientific guidance provided much needed moral support. I am indebted to Prof. Charles Gribble, in whose Russian and Slavic linguistics classes I became acquainted with Structuralism; these classes influenced the choice of my topic and provided me with the basic scientific vocabulary needed to formulate the ideas developed in this dissertation (as did many of the books that Prof. Gribble generously offered me). I am grateful to Prof. Anelya Rugaleva for directing my attention to the subtle connections between linguistics and the theory of literature, and also for encouraging me to follow a research lead that started in a course paper written for one of her classes, and later materialized, under Prof. Delic's supervision, in Chapter 4 of this dissertation. I also wish to thank the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures at the Ohio State University, for the intellectual and material support without which this project would not have been possible, and to all my professors and colleagues, iv from whom I had a lot to learn. Especially, I would like to thank the Department Chairman, Prof. Daniel Collins, who took time from his demanding schedule to become involved in this project. v VITA January 7, 1975……………………………. Born - Campina, Romania 1997………………………………………... B. A., Russian and French, Bucharest University, Romania 2001………………………………………... M.A., Russian, The Ohio State University 2001-present……………………………… Graduate Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract................................................................................................................................ii Acknowledgments.....................................................................................................................................iv Vita......................................................................................................................................vi List of Tables.....................................................................................................................ix List of Figures......................................................................................................................x Chapters: 1. Introduction..............................................................................................................1 1.1. The Object of Research................................................................................1 1.2. Outline of the Chapters................................................................................9 1.3. Context and Sources..................................................................................12 1.4. Limitations and delimitations....................................................................17 1.5. Intended audience and prerequisites..........................................................19 2. Information Theory in Semiotics, Its Limitations and Relevance.........................20 2.1. Preliminaries: Information-theoretic definitions.............................................20 2.1.1. Absolute entropy..............................................................................20 2.1.2. Conditional entropy and mutual information...................................23 2.1.3. The relationship between entropy and information.........................28 2.1.4. Summary..........................................................................................33 2.2. Entropy, predictability, and structure in language..........................................34 2.3. A critique of Lotman's interpretation of entropy and information..................38 2.4. The text as an information-theoretic object...................................................49 3. "Flying objects" in Georgii Ivanov's Распад атома and in the works of his contemporaries.......................................................................................................57 3.1 The verb "to fly" in the Russian linguistic background...................................57 3.2. The verb "to fly" and its context in Ivanov's Распад атома...........................60 3.3. The verb "to fly" and its contexts in Ivanov's poetry......................................63 3.4. The verb "to fly" in the poetry of Ivanov's contemporaries............................71 vii 3.5. Ivanov and Blok: Dialogue in "flight"............................................................77 4. Inter-textual communication: from a sonnet by Briusov to a novel by Bulgakov............................................................................83 4.1. Theoretical remarks........................................................................................83 4.2. Background: Mikhail Bulgakov's Master i Margarita....................................88 4.3. A sonnet and a novel......................................................................................89 4.4. Contemporary influences on Master i Margarita............................................99 4.5. Valerii Briusov's symbolist novel Ognennyi angel.......................................102 4.6. Why Briusov?...............................................................................................104 4.7. The figure of Briusov in Master i Margarita................................................108 4.8. A complex relationship.................................................................................114 4.9. Conclusions..................................................................................................118 5. Code and interpretation: Bunin's short stories and the language of myth...........121 5.1. The relationship code-text............................................................................121