In a series of one hundred maps, Franco Moretti explores the fictionalization of geography in the nineteenth-century novel. Balzac's Paris, Dickens's London and Scott's Scottish Lowlands are mapped, alongside the territories of Spanish picaresque novels, African colonial romances and Russian novels of ideas, in a path-breaking study which suggests that space may well be the secret protagonist of cultural history.

The field of narrative (or story) understanding and generation is one of the oldest in natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI), which is hardly surprising, since storytelling is such a fundamental and familiar intellectual and social activity. In recent years, the demands of interactive entertainment and interest in the creation of engaging narratives with life-like characters have provided a fresh impetus to this field. This book provides an overview of the principal problems, approaches, and challenges faced today in modeling the narrative structure of stories. The book introduces classical narratological concepts from literary theory and their mapping to computational approaches. It demonstrates how research in AI and NLP has modeled character goals, causality, and time using formalisms from planning, case-based reasoning, and temporal reasoning, and discusses fundamental limitations in such approaches. It proposes new representations for embedded narratives and fictional entities, for assessing the pace of a narrative, and offers an empirical theory of audience response. These notions are incorporated into an annotation scheme called Narrative ML. The book identifies key issues that need to be addressed, including annotation methods for long literary narratives, the representation of modality and habituality, and characterizing the goals of narrators. It also suggests a future characterized by advanced text mining of narrative structure from large-scale corpora and the development of a variety of useful authoring aids. This is the first book to provide a systematic foundation that integrates together narratology, AI, and computational linguistics. It can serve as a narratology primer for computer scientists and an elucidation of computational narratology for literary theorists. It is written in a highly accessible manner and is intended for use by a broad scientific audience that includes linguists (computational and formal semanticists), AI researchers, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, game developers, and narrative theorists.

Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900

Computational Modeling of Narrative

ion. For example, one of their categories is “Undesirable outcome” (1074), which seems to be at a level of abstraction above such categories as “Death of a loved one” and “Loss of a relationship” (1074; indeed, the second seems to be a case of the third which seems, in turn, to be a case of the first). But, insofar as they are concrete enough to count as prototypical, the categories they uncover are clearly in line with the preceding analysis. Thus, the eliciting conditions for sadness prominently include the two just mentioned, which are closely related to the prototype of happiness as romantic union. Other prototypes include “Discovering one is powerless” (1074), which is clearly related to the prototype of happiness as power. In relation to happiness itself, they isolate only three categories that are not overly abstract. These are “Receiving esteem, respect, praise,” “Being accepted, belonging,” and “Receiving love, liking, affection” (1075). The first is clearly connected with the prototype of happiness as power or authority. The third category is clearly related to the prototype of happiness as romantic union. The second category relates to both. Indeed, it relates to both in a way that bears on emplotment. Commonly, the conflicts that define the middle of a plot are resolved in such a way that the larger society comes together and there is an extension of acceptance and belonging in the end (e.g., through the reconciliation of parents and children in the romantic plot). In short, we seem to have some good prima facie evidence for positing two happiness prototypes. The point is not confined to modern America and Europe. Clearly, there were no broad scientific surveys or controlled experimental studies of emotion in premodern societies. However, there are highly regarded discussions and widely accepted ideas—such as the ancient Indic isolation of goals—that provide converging evidence. For example, Chikamatsu, widely thought of as one of the two greatest dramatists of Japan, wrote that, “The only happiness in this broad world” is “True love to true love” (234). The celebrated Malian Epic of Son-Jara states that “All people . . . seek to be men of power” (Sisòkò, I. 1277–78). Euripides’ Hecuba expresses both, lamenting the death of Astyanax: “if you had enjoyed youth and wedlock and the royal power that makes men gods, then you would have been happy” (200). These literary references lead to the second line of research. In order to consider cross-cultural prototypes in narrative, I set out to read a wide range of highly esteemed works of verbal art in unrelated literary traditions. I took up highly esteemed works as it seemed that they were most likely to express common narrative and emotional tendencies in a given culture or period. One crucial feature of a prototype-based account of

Theory and Interpretation of Narrative

The long superficial engagement of literary scholars with the cartographic lexicon (under the label of literary ‘spatial turn’) has led to a need for a ‘recartographization’ of the field. This tendency, however, still remains primarily embedded within analytical (‘cartography of literature’) or critical (‘critical literary cartography’) approaches, and fails to engage the recent development of post-representational rethinking of maps. Literary criticism, with its creative use of mapping words, and, above all, literary texts, with their involvement of practising maps, should be reconsidered as relevant sources for cartographic theorization and mapping research.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0309132513510587

Theorizing maps with literature

At present, nearly every media-related subject field appears to be “locative”, or with the prefix “geo” attached, be it the discussion on geoart, geosurveillance, or geocaching. Within this context, recent geographical and phenomenological studies on mobile media practices, in particular, reveal a trend toward a revaluation of place and placiality. While social sciences, media and cultural studies label this re-materialization of place “spatial turn,” a cultural, humanistic and media turn is acknowledged in geography. Currently, the two converging developments are still marked by differing conceptual formations: locative media and mediated localities. This paper as well as this issue are concerned with both sides—the spatial turn in media studies and the media turn in geographical studies—and provides a sketch of the subject area “geomedia” from a phenomenological perspective and the field of “media geography” from a dsciplinary perspective. As a theoretical framework for media geography in general and geomedia in particular, this article favors the actor-network theory for three reasons: a) The actornetwork theory tends to conceptualize places prior to the network of heterogeneous agents; b) it reveals itself to be a suitable heuristic for locative media as through the geotagging of objects instead of people, the actor-media theory permits a manifestation of what Bruno Latour means by the “Internet of Things” and, c) on the other hand, the actor-network theory puts us in a position whereby mediated localities can be described as if there is nothing more in the territory than what is in the map. Based on this argument, the conclusion can be drawn that media geography therefore also constitutes a new discipline for overcoming the very distinction between physical and human geography.

Additional excerpts

Locative Media and Mediated Localities: An Introduction to Media Geography

This essay questions the geographical categories used to underpin current theoretical and methodological approaches to “world literature,” which end up making nine-tenths of the world, and of literature produced in the world, drop off the world map or appear “peripheral.” Focusing on the multilingual north Indian region of Awadh in the early modern period, it argues that an approach to literature and space that takes multilingualism within society and literary culture as a structuring and generative principle and holds both local and cosmopolitan perspectives in view is more productive for world literature than approaches based only on cosmopolitan perspectives of circulation and recognition.

/pdf/the-multilingual-local-in-world-literature-3nnpi9aa4a.pdf

Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900

Citations

Computational Modeling of Narrative

Theory and Interpretation of Narrative

Theorizing maps with literature

Locative Media and Mediated Localities: An Introduction to Media Geography

The Multilingual Local in World Literature

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