Evolution in Literature: Texts and Series

Presentation at the Distinguishability in Genealogical Phylogenetic Networks workshop at the Lorenz Center (Leiden), showcasing how trees and networks have been used both in textual criticism and historiography of literature. I briefly discussed stemmatology (with specific example from the Bible and from the Divine Comedy), as well as history of literature mentioning Tynyanov and Jauss.

Transcript

1. Evolution in Literature:
   Texts and Series
   Evolution in Literature:
   Texts and Series
   Tiago Tresoldi
   Computer-Assisted Language Comparison (CALC)
   Max Planck Institute for the Science of
   Human History (MPI-SHH / Jena)
   

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2. Textual Criticism
   ●
   Investigates the evolution of written texts,
   focusing in understanding differences among
   copies of a work (its witnesses) in order to
   produce a critical edition
   – Concepts of “errors” and “corruption”
   ●
   Evolved from the long tradition of “philology”
   (religious and legal exegesis) into a scientific
   discipline in the same period and cultural
   framework of Darwinism and Historical
   Linguistics
   

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3. Steps of Stemmatology
   ●
   Recensio, a survey collecting textual and non-textual
   information of all copies
   ●
   Collatio, scrutiny of manuscripts’ contents which are
   transcribed, aligned, and compared
   ●
   Identification of shared disjunctive errors, assumed as
   evidence of relationship
   ●
   Production of the stemma codicum, a tree representing the
   evolution of the tradition
   ●
   Emendatio, a reconstruction that explains the variants and
   represents the archetype
   

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4. Stemma Codicum for Dante Aligheri’s Divine Comedy (source: Petrocchi, 1965)
   

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5. Textual Tradition of the Gospels (source: yuriystasyuk.com)
   

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6. Relationships among the Synoptic Gospels
   

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7. Augustinian Theory Q Hypothesis
   Farrer Theory Jerusalem School Hypothesis
   

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8. Phylogenetics
   ●
   First phylogenetic methods by Platnick & Cameron
   (1977)
   ●
   Number of editions using such method is increasing
   very slowly: Barbrook et al. (1998); Stolz (2003); Lantin
   et al. (2004); Shaw (2011), as well as critical thinking
   over it as Robinson (2016)
   – Overall, low acceptance
   ●
   For a review of developments, criticisms and
   responses, see Macé & Baret (2006), Howe et al.
   (2012)
   

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9. Consensus phylogram the Divine Comedy (source: Tresoldi, not published)
   

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10. NN for selected manuscripts of the Divine Comedy (source: Tresoldi, not published)
    

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11. From history to evolution
    ●
    Historiography of literature is itself a genre, of teleological
    motivation
    – Gervinus’ Geschichte der poetischen Nationallitteratur der Deutschen
    (1835–1842)
    – De Sanctis’ Storia della letteratura italiana (1883)
    ●
    Not evolution but either
    – A path towards some individuality (of genre, of national literature, etc.)
    – The biological metaphor
    ●
    After the nationalist experiences, either
    – Psychological genesis – evolution by authors “ahead of time”
    – The history of genres
    – Influences (Warburg, Curtius)
    ●
    Still being taught this way
    

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12. Yury Tynyanov
    ●
    First serious movement from “chronology” to
    “evolution” (Литературная эволюция
    [Literaturnaya evolyutsiya], 1927)
    – Part of the Russian “Formalism”, associated with
    Jakobson and Trubetzkoy in linguistics
    ●
    The study of genesis is not the study of evolution
    ●
    Condition of being literary is defined by the
    opposition with the non-literary
    – Experiments with sound symbolism are sometimes
    child play, sometimes vanguard (зáумь [zaum])
    – Elevated odes of the 18th c. (Derzhavin) automatized,
    replaced first by “feminine” poetry (Karamzin), and then
    by the narrative strategies of letters (Turgenev),
    preparing the way for the Golden Age (Tolstoy,
    Dostoyevsky)
    

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13. Tynyanov and Series
    Narrative Fiction
    Poetry
    

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14. Tynyanov and Series
    Narrative Fiction
    Poetry
    Popular Verse
    Court Verse
    

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15. Tynyanov and Series
    Narrative Fiction
    Poetry
    Popular Verse
    Court Verse
    Letters, Private Communication
    Philosophy
    

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16. Tynyanov and Series
    Narrative Fiction
    Poetry
    Popular Verse
    Court Verse
    Letters, Private Communication
    Philosophy
    

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17. Tynyanov and Series
    Narrative Fiction
    Poetry
    Popular Verse
    Court Verse
    Letters, Private Communication
    Philosophy
    

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18. Tynyanov and Series
    Narrative Fiction
    Poetry
    Popular Verse
    Court Verse
    Letters, Private Communication
    Philosophy
    

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19. Tynyanov and Series
    Narrative Fiction
    Poetry
    Popular Verse
    Court Verse
    Letters, Private Communication
    Philosophy
    

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20. Hans-Robert Jauß
    ●
    Against the contempt for the contemporary
    ●
    The evolution is not explained by “sources”
    and especially “influences”
    ●
    History is the history of reception
    ●
    The horizon of expectation
    – The structure by which the public comprehends
    any text, based on cultural codes and conventions
    particular to their time in history
    – Influence comes not from the text, but from how
    the text is read
    – Influence is not only or necessarily intertextuality –
    there might be influence without the same text,
    and the same text might have a different meaning
    

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21. An example: Ulysses
    ●
    Iliad and Odyssey (8th-6th c. BCE)
    ●
    Attic Tragedies (5th c. BCE)
    ●
    Aeneid (Virgil, 29-19 BCE)
    ●
    Medieval vulgarizations
    – Le Roman de Troie (Sainte-Maure, c. 1160)
    ●
    Divine Comedy (Alighieri, 1308-1321)
    ●
    Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare, 1602)
    ●
    Ulysses (Tennyson, 1842)
    ●
    Ulysses (Joyce, 1920)
    ●
    Post-war adaptations (including television,
    comics, etc.)
    

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22. Odyssey
    

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23. Odyssey
    Iliad
    

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24. Odyssey
    Iliad
    

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25. Odyssey
    Iliad
    Near-East Epics
    

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26. Odyssey
    Iliad
    Near-East Epics Oral Trojan Tradition
    

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27. Odyssey
    Iliad
    Near-East Epics Oral Trojan Tradition
    Hermes’ Trickster
    narratives
    

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28. Odyssey
    Iliad
    Near-East Epics Oral Trojan Tradition
    Hermes’ Trickster
    narratives
    Etruscan, Italic
    narratives
    

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29. Odyssey
    Iliad
    Near-East Epics Oral Trojan Tradition
    Hermes’ Trickster
    narratives
    Etruscan, Italic
    narratives
    Epic Cycle
    

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30. Odyssey
    Iliad
    Near-East Epics Oral Trojan Tradition
    Hermes’ Trickster
    narratives
    Etruscan, Italic
    narratives
    Epic Cycle Lyrical Poetry
    

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31. Odyssey
    Iliad
    Near-East Epics Oral Trojan Tradition
    Hermes’ Trickster
    narratives
    Etruscan, Italic
    narratives
    Epic Cycle Lyrical Poetry
    Attic Tragedy
    

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32. Odyssey
    Iliad
    Near-East Epics Oral Trojan Tradition
    Hermes’ Trickster
    narratives
    Etruscan, Italic
    narratives
    Epic Cycle Lyrical Poetry
    Attic Tragedy
    Pre-Cynic
    Philosophy
    

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33. Odyssey
    Iliad
    Near-East Epics Oral Trojan Tradition
    Hermes’ Trickster
    narratives
    Etruscan, Italic
    narratives
    Epic Cycle Lyrical Poetry
    Attic Tragedy
    Pre-Cynic
    Philosophy
    Post-Cynic
    Philosophy
    

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34. Odyssey
    Iliad
    Near-East Epics Oral Trojan Tradition
    Hermes’ Trickster
    narratives
    Etruscan, Italic
    narratives
    Epic Cycle Lyrical Poetry
    Attic Tragedy
    Pre-Cynic
    Philosophy
    Post-Cynic
    Philosophy
    Roman narratives
    Roman & Christian
    Philosophy
    

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35. Odyssey
    Iliad
    Near-East Epics Oral Trojan Tradition
    Hermes’ Trickster
    narratives
    Etruscan, Italic
    narratives
    Epic Cycle Lyrical Poetry
    Attic Tragedy
    Pre-Cynic
    Philosophy
    Post-Cynic
    Philosophy
    Roman narratives
    Roman & Christian
    Philosophy
    Second
    Sophistics
    

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36. Philosophy
    Fiction,
    Poetry
    Dictis & Dares
    

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37. Philosophy
    Fiction,
    Poetry
    Dictis & Dares
    Medieval Trojan
    Narratives
    

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38. Philosophy
    Fiction,
    Poetry
    Dictis & Dares
    Medieval Trojan
    Narratives
    Divine Commedy
    

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39. Philosophy
    Fiction,
    Poetry
    Dictis & Dares
    Medieval Trojan
    Narratives
    Divine Commedy
    New Interpretation of the
    Divine Comedy
    

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40. Philosophy
    Fiction,
    Poetry
    Dictis & Dares
    Medieval Trojan
    Narratives
    Divine Commedy
    Odyssey
    New Interpretation of the
    Divine Comedy
    Odyssey
    

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41. Philosophy
    Fiction,
    Poetry
    Dictis & Dares
    Medieval Trojan
    Narratives
    Divine Commedy
    Odyssey
    New Interpretation of the
    Divine Comedy
    Odyssey
    Translations,
    Adaptations
    

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42. Philosophy
    Fiction,
    Poetry
    Dictis & Dares
    Medieval Trojan
    Narratives
    Divine Commedy
    Odyssey
    New Interpretation of the
    Divine Comedy
    Odyssey
    Translations,
    Adaptations
    Shakespeare
    

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43. Philosophy
    Fiction,
    Poetry
    Dictis & Dares
    Medieval Trojan
    Narratives
    Divine Commedy
    Odyssey
    New Interpretation of the
    Divine Comedy
    Odyssey
    Translations,
    Adaptations
    Romanticism,
    Sea Narratives
    Shakespeare
    

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44. Philosophy
    Fiction,
    Poetry
    Dictis & Dares
    Medieval Trojan
    Narratives
    Divine Commedy
    Odyssey
    New Interpretation of the
    Divine Comedy
    Odyssey
    Translations,
    Adaptations
    Romanticism,
    Sea Narratives
    Most contemporary
    narratives
    Shakespeare
    

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45. Philosophy
    Fiction,
    Poetry
    Dictis & Dares
    Medieval Trojan
    Narratives
    Divine Commedy
    Odyssey
    New Interpretation of the
    Divine Comedy
    Odyssey
    Translations,
    Adaptations
    Romanticism,
    Sea Narratives
    Most contemporary
    narratives
    Shakespeare
    Joyce
    

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46. Darwinian literary studies
    ●
    Arising with the dissatisfaction with
    post-structuralism and post-
    modernism
    ●
    Study of literature in the context of
    evolution by means of natural
    selection (including gene-culture co-
    evolution)
    ●
    Digital Humanities, “distant reading”
    and longue durée
    ●
    Evolution of literature in the
    framework of cultural evolution
    

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47. “Admixture”
    ●
    Stemmatology can be used to study the evolution in the reception
    – Bédier and the “good copy”
    ●
    Historiography of literature is not ready to use quantitative methods
    (but Darwinian literary studies are getting there)
    – Understand its own history
    – Understand evolution in other fields, analogies and differences
    – Make hypotheses and test them – are features possible, and if so which
    features?
    – Intertextuality is not a complete answer… but it is where we should start
    ●
    For phylogenetics
    – Understand evolution in other fields
    – Consider literary evolution as one of the extreme cases in cultural evolution
    – Understand that descendency material might not be intertextual, and that
    influence might be “negative”
    

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48. Cited Refereces
    BARBROOK, Adrian C.; HOWE, Christopher J.; BLAKE, Norman; ROBINSON, Peter (1998). “The
    Phylogeny of the Canterbury Tales.” Nature, 394 (6696): 839.
    HOWE, Christopher J.; CONNOLLY, Ruth; WINDRAM, Heather F. (2012). “Responding to Criticisms of
    Phylogenetic Methods in Stemmatology.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 52 (1): 51-67.
    LANTIN, Anne-Catherine; BARET, Philippe V.; MACÉ, Caroline (2004). “Phylogenetic Analysis of
    Gregory of Nazianzus’ Homily 27.” 7èmes Journées Internationales d’Analyse statistique des Données
    Textuelles: 700-707.
    MACÉ, Caroline; BARET, Philippe V. (2006). “Why Phylogenetic Methods Work: the Theory of Evolution
    and Textual Criticism.” in Linguistica Computazionale. The Evolution of Texts: Confronting
    Stemmatological and Genetical Methods 24: 89-108.
    PLATNICK, Norman I.; DON CAMERON, H. (1977). “Cladistic Methods in Textual, Linguistic, and
    Phylogenetic Analysis.” Systematic Zoology: 380-385.
    ROBINSON, Peter (2016). “Four Rules for the Application of Phylogenetics in the Analysis of Textual
    Traditions.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 31 (3): 637-651.
    SHAW, Prue (2011). Commedia: a Digital Edition. Birmingham: Scholarly Digital Editions.
    STOLZ, Michael (2003). “New Philology and New Phylogeny: Aspects of a Critical Electronic
    Edition of Wolfram’s Parzival.” Literary and Linguistic Computing, 18 (2): 139-150.
    

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49. Thank you!
    Thank you!
    Tiago Tresoldi
    tresoldi@shh.mpg.de
    

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