This presentation was made in the Refresher Course in English on the theme of Pleasure of Dissecting the Text: The Poetics of Literary Theories and Criticism in English organised by UGC HRDC - Madurai Kamraj University, Tamilnadu

1. Refresher Course in English on the theme of
Pleasure of Dissecting the Text: The Poetics of
Literary Theories and Criticism in English
Dilip Barad
Prof. & Head, Department of English
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University, Gujarat
www.dilipbarad.com
MADURAI KAMARAJ UNIVERSITY
(University with Potential for Excellence)
Re-accredited by NAAC with A++ in the 4th cycle
MADURAI - 625 021

2. The Past, the
Present and the
Future of Dissecting
Literary Texts:
From Moral
Philosophical
Approach to

3. William Wordsworth – The Tables Turned
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.
Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

5. Traditional Tools
• Textual scholarship:
• Do we have an accurate version of whatever we are
dissecting?
• Genre:
• What are we dealing with?
• Source Study:
• Did earlier writings help this work come into being?

6. Traditional Tools
• Historical and Biographical Approach
• French critic Hippolyte A. Taine - race, milieu, and moment
• Poets have from earliest times been the historians, the interpreters of
contemporary culture, and the prophets of their people.
• Moral and Philosophical Approach
• The moral-philosophical approach is as old as classical Greek and Roman
critics. Plato, for example, emphasized moralism and utilitarianism
• From their point of view Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus can be read
profitably only if one understands existentialism

7. Function of literature: Aestheticism vs Didacticism
Responses from the participants

8. Literature vs Religion vs Science/technology
Responses from the participants

9. Responses from the participants

10. Responses from the participants

11. Responses from the participants

12. New Criticism of the 20th Century
• The Formalist Approach
• The Psychological Approach: Freud
• Mythological and Archetypal Approaches
• The Play of Meaning(s): Deconstruction
• Feminisms and Gender Studies
• Cultural Studies

13. Let us apply these tools to
dissect classic texts

14. Deconstructive Reading of Sonnet 18
• SONNET 18 (William Shakespeare)
• Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

15. Digital Humanities: The 21st Century
• Technology to ‘read’ literature
• Technology to ‘write’ literature
• Technology to ‘analyze’ literature
• Postcolonial Studies in our time – The Repression of big-trans-
national corporations and environmentalists / third world citizens
(reduced to Market)

16. From Creative Literature to Generative Literature
•Generative literature, defined as the production of
continuously changing literary texts by means of a specific
dictionary, some set of rules and the use of algorithms, is a
very specific form of digital literature which is completely
changing most of the concepts of classical literature.
•Texts being produced by a computer and not written by an
author, require indeed a very special way of engrammation
and, in consequence, also point to a specific way of reading
particularly concerning all the aspects of the literary time.
• Principles and Processes of Generative Literature: Questions to Literature: Jean-Pierre Balpe

18. https://forms.gle/fthgVeDBgw7MLicW8

19. Responses from the participants
What surprises is the fact that
we humans are not able to come
to common consensus on
whether the poem is written by
human or computer?

20. Poem Generator
Machines
Generative
Literature
is text produced through computers
with the help of set of rules,
dictionaries . . . Algorithm.

21. Matthew Jockers: Microanalysis

22. Aiden and Michel
Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture

23. Finally . . .
• New Challenges . . .
• The Artificial Intelligence & the Unconscious Bias
• Kirti Sharma & Robin Hauser
• Can we protect AI from human biases?
• The Question of Morality -
http://moralmachine.mit.edu/

25. • http://moralmachine.mit.edu/
• A platform for gathering a human perspective on moral decisions
made by machine intelligence, such as self-driving cars.

26. •While the literary project for making
humans humane is yet not over, the
humanities people have new challenges
to make robots humane!
•… and . . . We want to see more of Digital
Technologies along with ICT in researches
in Humanities and in the pedagogy of
teaching literature.

27. सा विद्या या विमुक्तये ।
तमसो मा ज्योततर्गमय ।
Reinventing Human Being.
Thank you
www.dilipbarad.com

28. • “Application of ICT in Research, Role and Tools of ICT | Scholarify.In,” May 22, 2019.
https://www.scholarify.in/application-of-ict-in-research/.
• Australia, Education Services. “Digital Technologies Skills vs ICT Skills | Digital Technologies Hub.” Accessed
August 21, 2021. http://www.digitaltechnologieshub.edu.au/resourcedetail.
• ———. “Home | Digital Technologies Hub.” Accessed August 21, 2021.
https://www.digitaltechnologieshub.edu.au/.
• ———. “ICT vs Digital Technologies | Digital Technologies Hub.” Accessed August 21, 2021.
http://www.digitaltechnologieshub.edu.au/teachers/australian-curriculum/ict-vs-digital-technologies.
• “CLiC — CLiC User Guide v2.1.1 Documentation.” Accessed August 21, 2021.
https://clic.readthedocs.io/en/2.1/.
• University of Birmingham. “CLiC Dickens.” Accessed August 21, 2021.
https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/edacs/departments/englishlanguage/research/projects/clic/index.as
px.
• “ELAN | The Language Archive.” Accessed August 21, 2021. https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan.
• Fahringer, Alyssa. “InfoGuides: Text Analysis Tools: Google Ngram Viewer.” Accessed August 21, 2021.
https://infoguides.gmu.edu/textanalysistools/ngram.
• “Google Arts & Culture.” Accessed August 21, 2021. https://artsandculture.google.com/.
• “Google Arts & Culture.” Accessed August 21, 2021. https://artsandculture.google.com/.
• “Google Books Ngram Viewer.” Accessed August 21, 2021. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?.
• M, Kim. “Making Sense of ICT in the Classroom | LinkedIn.” Accessed August 21, 2021.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/making-sense-ict-classroom-kim-maslin/.
• Research, Centre for Corpus. “CLiC.” CLiC. Accessed August 21, 2021. https://clic.bham.ac.uk/.

29. CLiC
• https://www.digitaltechnologieshub.edu.au/
• https://clic.bham.ac.uk/
• Welcome to CLiC. The CLiC web app has been developed as part
of the CLiC Dickens project, which demonstrates through
corpus stylistics how computer-assisted methods can be used to
study literary texts and lead to new insights into how readers
perceive fictional characters.
• Mahlberg, M., Stockwell, P., de Joode, J., Smith, C., &
O’Donnell, M. B. (2016). CLiC Dickens: Novel uses of
concordances for the integration of corpus stylistics and
cognitive poetics. Corpora, 11(3), 433–463.