Modeling Literary Criticism: How to Do It and How to Teach It to Humans and Machines

How would you replicate Eric Auerbach's masterful critical readings of Western literature? How to teach students effectively and in detail what steps to follow in analyzing a literary text? Is it possible to teach a computer to perform a thematic critical reading of a novel or short story? Dan Shen does not address these questions explicitly, but the methodology she uses to develop a theory of dual narrative dynamics invites us to explore them. In the book Style and Rhetoric of Short Narrative Fiction: Covert Progressions Behind Overt Plots, Shen already extensively illustrated her analytical method, taking into account concepts from narratology and stylistics that she put at work in synergy. The essay "'Covert Progression' and Dual Narrative Dynamics" is a step further in clarifying how decades of literary criticism can be modelled into an "interpretation protocol" (Liu) useful to start exploring the complexity of literary texts—a model that could inform the learning process of both humans (cf. Herman et al.) and machines (cf. McCarty; Flanders and Jannidis).

Shen explicitly presents interpretive processes that go beyond textual elements, linking them to historical context, authorial traits, and literary conventions. Accounting for these elements in close reading is often a challenge for both students and computers alike, because they require a knowledge extending beyond the boundaries of the text under scrutiny. In other words, they require access to the right kind of contextual information and making meaningful connections. For students, this means spending a lot of time reading secondary sources and creating mental maps that will help them interpret the text. For computers, it means being fed additional corpora of texts and a set of rules to process them when required, based on certain features of the analyzed text or questions posed by the critic. In both cases, a good literary theory is essential in order to know what kind of information to look for and how to use it.

Similar to how folklore studies and narratology made explicit and formalized the dynamics of plot, "covert progression" is a useful model for thematic interpretation. I think this is a very positive aspect of Shen's theory, and I would like to summarize her model in more pedagogical terms—departing from her fifteen theses—in order to show how it can be useful for teaching step-by-step how to perform a thematic critical reading of a literary text. Interestingly, Shen's model can be used not only with students but with computers as well, providing an operative model translatable into instructions for machine reading (Hayles; Kestemont and Herman).

The steps to be followed to test the possible existence of a covert progression are:

1. 1. Individuate odd, puzzling, trivial, or digressive linguistic choices ("recalcitrant materials," Phelan), or peripheral details

2. 2. Check if they appear throughout the text (this process may require many rereadings because newfound material can suggest looking at other aspects)

3. 3. If yes, outline the event structure of the covert progression, following the appearance of the recalcitrant materials

4. 4. Consider why the identified elements are not part of the overt plot

5. 5. Find contextual explanations (authorial, historical, intertextual) that can guide the interpretation

When finding recalcitrant materials

one need examine carefully whether they interact with other linguistic choices in different parts of the text to convey implicitly a contrastive or even opposite kind of thematic meaning and to portray different character images. If the result of the exploration is more or less validating, the analyst not only needs to carry out the stylistic analysis along the two different trajectories of signification (frequently adjusting the direction in the process of the analysis), but also needs to pay attention to the interaction between them.

(Shen, "'Covert Progression'" 23)

Once the probability of having dual narrative dynamics is assessed, the analyst has to explore how they interact with each other—tending either toward harmonious complementation or drastic subversion—and remembering that "'covert progression' is an undercurrent paralleling the plot development, with the same central character(s) and the same events but implicitly conveying contrastive or opposite thematic...