University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2016 Prolegomena To The Automated Analysis Of A Bilingual Poetry Corpus, With Particular Reference To An Annotated Edition Of “the Cantos” Of Ezra Pound Robin Seguy University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Seguy, Robin, "Prolegomena To The Automated Analysis Of A Bilingual Poetry Corpus, With Particular Reference To An Annotated Edition Of “the Cantos” Of Ezra Pound" (2016). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2576. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2576 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2576 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Prolegomena To The Automated Analysis Of A Bilingual Poetry Corpus, With Particular Reference To An Annotated Edition Of “the Cantos” Of Ezra Pound Abstract Standing at the intersection of a theoretical investigation into the possibilities of applying the tools and methods of automated analysis to a large plurilingual poetry corpus and of a set of observables gleaned along the creation of a digitally annotated edition of The Cantos of Ezra Pound — a robust test-case for the TEI — the present dissertation can be read under different guises. One of them, for instance, would be that of a comedy, divina commedia or com�dia de Deus, in which the computer plays — Leibnizian harmonics! — the part of supreme intellect. A: The selva oscura is that of newly born “Digital Humanities” — burgeoning yet obscured already by two dominant paradigms. On the one hand, the constructivism inherited from poststructuralist theory; on the other, a na�ve return to the most trivial kind of linguistic realism. There, the literary text is construed as an object of absolute singularity, transcending any possible analysis based on explicit methods; here, it becomes a mere point in a network of quodities. Literariness is gone. The second circle revolves around a singular, and singularly marked, exemple of antinomian discourse — the concomitant use of the notions of error and genius in respect to The Cantos — the uniqueness of the modernist project supposed to defeat all generalizing claims made by philology. Alas, facts are stubborn things; so are mistakes. These must be corrected, but on what grounds? We plead for the necessity of a genetic — a digital genetic — edition, which only can transcend the arbitrary organizational imperialism of standard sheets of paper. B. The purgatory of labor, the attempts to analyze the text without betraying its intricacies. What is a line? What is a proper name? What is a quotation? The path is steep, but the air starts to clear up. C. Ascension — Love supreme — Paradise in sight: the realm of results. Through graphs, colors appear, in the stead of black ink on white paper — beautifully, but oh so fleetingly! Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Comparative Literature and Literary Theory First Advisor Charles Bernstein Keywords Cantos, The, Digital Humanities, Philology, Pound, Ezra Subject Categories English Language and Literature This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2576 PROLEGOMENA TO THE AUTOMATED ANALYSIS OF A BILINGUAL POETRY CORPUS, WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO AN ANNOTATED EDITION OF THE CANTOS OF EZRA POUND Robin Seguy A DISSERTATION in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2016 Supervisor of Dissertation Charles Bernstein, Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature Graduate Group Chairperson Emily Watson, Professor of Classical Studies Dissertation committee Rita Barnard, Professor of English and Comparative Literature Mark Liberman, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Linguistics PROLEGOMENA TO THE AUTOMATED ANALYSIS OF A BILINGUAL POETRY CORPUS, WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO AN ANNOTATED EDITION OF THE CANTOS OF EZRA POUND COPYRIGHT 2016 Robin Seguy This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. Pour ma mère, qui, dès le premier jour – ou peut-être même avant déjà – n’a eu de cesse de me poser cette lancinante question: « Quand est-ce que tu la finis, cette bon Dieu de thèse ? » À la mémoire de ma grand-mère. UBI AMOR, IBI OCULUS iii Travailler pour l’incertain, aller sur la mer, passer sur une planche. PASCAL iv ABSTRACT PROLEGOMENA TO THE AUTOMATED ANALYSIS OF A BILINGUAL POETRY CORPUS, WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO AN ANNOTATED EDITION OF THE CANTOS OF EZRA POUND Robin Seguy Charles Bernstein Standing at the intersection of a theoretical investigation into the possibilities of applying the tools and methods of automated analysis to a large plurilingual poetry corpus and of a set of observables gleaned along the creation of a digitally annotated edition of The Cantos of Ezra Pound — a robust test-case for the TEI — the present dissertation can be read under different guises. One of them, for instance, would be that of a comedy, divina commedia or comédia de Deus, in which the computer plays — Leibnizian harmonics! — the part of supreme intellect. A: The selva oscura is that of newly born “Digital Humanities” — burgeoning yet obscured already by two dominant paradigms. On the one hand, the constructivism inherited from poststructuralist theory; on the other, a naïve return to the most trivial kind of linguistic realism. There, the literary text is construed as an object of absolute singularity, transcending v any possible analysis based on explicit methods; here, it becomes a mere point in a network of quodities. Literariness is gone. The second circle revolves around a singular, and singularly marked, exemple of antinomian discourse — the concomitant use of the notions of error and genius in respect to The Cantos — the uniqueness of the modernist project supposed to defeat all generalizing claims made by philology. Alas, facts are stubborn things; so are mistakes. These must be corrected, but on what grounds? We plead for the necessity of a genetic — a digital genetic — edition, which only can transcend the arbitrary organizational imperialism of standard sheets of paper. B. The purgatory of labor, the attempts to analyze the text without betraying its intricacies. What is a line? What is a proper name? What is a quotation? The path is steep, but the air starts to clear up. C. Ascension — Love supreme — Paradise in sight: the realm of results. Through graphs, colors appear, in the stead of black ink on white paper — beautifully, but oh so fleetingly! vi Table of Contents ABSTRACT V TABLE OF CONTENTS VII FOREWORD IX A. PONDERING 1 1. THE BAD TURN OF THE DIGITAL TURN 2 1.1. HARK! THE DIGITAL ANGELS SING 2 1.2. LITERARY COMPUTING BETWEEN SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS 9 1.2.1. Jerome McGann and the Postmodern School of “Bullshit” 11 1.2.2. Jockers, Moretti, the “Big Data” Fallacy and the Oblivion of Textuality 35 2. INCORRIGIBLE POUND — PHILOLOGY, POLITICS OF RECEPTION AND THE TEXT OF THE CANTOS 49 2.1. REPEAT! 49 2.2. OF WILLS, WISHES AND VOLITIONS 55 2.3. OLD EZ VS PHILOLOGERS 58 2.4. THEORIES OF GENIUS 69 2.5. POLITICS OF RECEPTION 78 2.6. BEYOND COPY-TEXT: HYPERTEXT AS A MODEL FOR GENETIC EDITIONS 84 B. ENCODING 88 3. TOWARDS A READABLE DIGITAL TEXT OF THE CANTOS — STRUCTURAL QUESTIONS 89 3.1. WHAT IS ENCODING? CHOICE OF A STANDARD 90 3.2. DIGITIZING 94 vii 3.3. ENCODING STRUCTURES (1) — THE FORMAL DIMENSION 95 3.3.1. Text and Peritext: the Erasure of Textual Boundaries in the Modernist Project 96 3.3.2 What Is a Line? (1) — Prose in Verse 105 3.3.3 What Is a Line? (2) — The Ideogrammatic Model 114 3.4. ENCODING STRUCTURES (2) — OF DIRECT SPEECHES, QUOTATIONS, AND RESULTING PUNCTUATION FIREWORKS 121 4. PROPER NAMES 130 4.1. HOW TO CLIMB 131 4.2. ANCESTORS: ANNOTATING THE CANTOS AFTER EDWARDS & VASSE AND TERRELL 133 4.2.1. Edwards and Vasse’s Annotated Index 134 4.2.2. Terrell’s Companion 135 4.3. PROPER NAMES BEYOND REFERENCE 143 4.3.1. Reference and textuality 149 4.3.2. Limits of the domain proper names 150 C. READING 160 5. A BIRD’S EYE-VIEW OF SOME FORMAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CANTOS 161 5.1. THE FREEING OF THE FORM: LENGTH(S) OF THE CANTOS 165 5.2. THE USE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES 171 5.3. TOWARDS A GAZETEER: AN GLANCE AT THE USE OF TOPONYMS IN THE CANTOS 181 5.3.1. Quantitative data 184 5.3.2. Introduction of new names — Thematic rhythms 191 5.3.3. For a geography of The Cantos 196 5.4. NEW DIRECTIONS? 209 APPENDICES 211 1. A SAMPLE FROM THE XML-TEI ENCODING: “CANTO LXXIV” 212 2. ADDITIONAL GRAPHS 240 3. CODA TO § 1.2.1. (A POST-FACTUM FIRST-PERSON-SINGULAR APOLOGY — BOTH WAYS) 257 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES 262 viii Foreword And Brancusi repeating: je peux commencer une chose tous les jours, mais fiiniiiir POUND Bresson writes, in one of his Notes, about the abyss separating the film that was conceived, mentally, and the material result of the conception. Such an abyss is of course true for all tasks born out of an idea, then planned and materialized in sublunar time. The following pages both escape and illustrate to an extreme this discrepancy.