Digital Scholarship Seminar:

Brad Pasanek (University of Virginia) and Moore Institute visiting fellow

Poetic Diction: Tokens and Change

Digital Scholarship Seminar‘s final visiting speaker event of this series takes place next Tuesday lunchtime and features Dr Brad Pasanek from the Department of English at the University of Virginia. Dr Pasanek is a current Moore Institute Visiting Fellow, and his talk focuses on computing the language of early modern poetry. The presentation will be followed by lunch (kindly provided by the Moore Institute) at 1pm.

Abstract: “Poetic diction” is an early modern term of art, used to mark distinctions between prose and verse. It signals a belief that poets speak and write a special kind of language. But “poetic diction” is also the term selected by William Wordsworth in the preface to Lyrical Ballads to sum up and mark a break with eighteenth-century poetics. “Poetic diction,” complained Wordsworth, is “mechanical” and “artificial,” a “hubbub of words.” Poets should instead write poems, claims Wordsworth, famously, in the “real language of men.” By 1800, it would seem, the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stock of words and phrases was well worn if not worn out.

Poetic diction, as a topic of scholarly interest, had itself become a worn one by the 1950s; but then computational methods may offer new insights into moribund topics. In particular, when I see critics compile a large “set of phrases” that occur with “wearisome iteration” or provide a short list of stock phraseology (“blushing flowers,” “cool gales,” ” lab’ring oxen,” “curling smokes,” “fleet shades,” and “dusky green”), it is the mechanical, iterative quality of the verse surveyed that most interests me. Computational methods work by iteration; and from the perspective of a computational linguist, the stock of phrases complained of by some literary critics are so many types and tokens, waiting to counted and mapped. In the current moment, in which great quantities of verse-Metaphysical, Neoclassical, Romantic-have been digitized, an opportunity to identify the stock of phrases and visualize their changing frequencies presents itself.

Bio: Brad Pasanek is an Assistant Professor in the English Department of the University of Virginia. His first book, Metaphors of Mind: An Eighteenth-Century Dictionary ships in the coming month from Johns Hopkins University Press. (Act now! Buy two, get one free.) His efforts have been described by one of his colleagues in the digital humanities, as “distant reading by hand,” and his book digests and analyzes over 10,000 of the metaphors collected online at The Mind is a Metaphor.

For further informatition, contact: Dr PÌÁdraic Moran (padraic.moran@nuigalway.ie),

or Dr Justitin Tonra (justitin.tonra@nuigalway.ie)

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