Verbs as well as nouns can be more or less abstract. Verbs like 'count' and 'write' are solid, concrete and unambiguous, while verbs like 'help' and 'insult' are open to some interpretation.
Contents contributed and discussions participated by Weiye Loh
Why Concrete Language Communicates Truth - PsyBlog - 0 views
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Even a verb's tense can affect its perceived concreteness. The passive tense is usually thought more abstract, because it doesn't refer to the actor by name. Perhaps that's partly why fledgling writers are often told to write in the active tense: to the reader it will seem more true.
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three reasons why concreteness suggests truth: Our minds process concrete statements more quickly, and we automatically associate quick and easy with true (check out these studies on the power of simplicity). We can create mental pictures of concrete statements more easily. When something is easier to picture, it's easier to recall, so seems more true. Also, when something is more easily pictured it seems more plausible, so it's more readily believed.
Kamila Shamsie on the perils and delights of translation | Books | The Guardian - 0 views
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When it comes to books of high merit, the translated sentence that fails to relay some nuance or music of the original, is tinged with loss; the translated sentence that doesn't understand the nuance or music to begin with is negligent; the untranslated sentence is a terrible deprivation.
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"translated" and "foreign" are two separate things – sometimes a translated world can feel far more familiar than the foreign worlds I might find in a novel of the English language; and as a reader I am at home with both familiarity and foreignness.
The Mechanic Muse - What Is Distant Reading? - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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We need distant reading, Moretti argues, because its opposite, close reading, can't uncover the true scope and nature of literature. Let's say you pick up a copy of "Jude the Obscure," become obsessed with Victorian fiction and somehow manage to make your way through all 200-odd books generally considered part of that canon. Moretti would say: So what? As many as 60,000 other novels were published in 19th-century England - to mention nothing of other times and places. You might know your George Eliot from your George Meredith, but you won't have learned anything meaningful about literature, because your sample size is absurdly small. Since no feasible amount of reading can fix that, what's called for is a change not in scale but in strategy. To understand literature, Moretti argues, we must stop reading books.
Basic Training | Futility Closet - 0 views
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"Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing," Hemingway told a reporter in 1940. "I've never forgotten them. No man with any talent, who feels and writes truly about the thing he is trying to say, can fail to write well if he abides with them."
Free Language Lessons | Open Culture - 1 views
Between Page and Screen - 0 views
Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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Marginalia was more common in the 1800s. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a prolific margin writer, as were William Blake and Charles Darwin. In the 20th century it mostly came to be regarded like graffiti: something polite and respectful people did not do. Paul F. Gehl, a curator at the Newberry, blamed generations of librarians and teachers for “inflicting us with the idea” that writing in books makes them “spoiled or damaged.”
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Studs Terkel, the oral historian, was known to admonish friends who would read his books but leave them free of markings. He told them that reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation.
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marginalia enriched a book, as readers infer other meanings, and lends it historical context. “The digital revolution is a good thing for the physical object,” he said. As more people see historical artifacts in electronic form, “the more they’re going to want to encounter the real object.”
Asymptote: Literary Encounters Between Languages and Cultures | the kent rid... - 0 views
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Asymptote is a new, international literary journal dedicated to the translation of literary works, both from various languages to English as well as from English to other languages. It was founded by our very own Singaporean writer, Lee Yew Leong, whose editorial team spans various continents and cultures – South Asia, the Middle East, Europe, America and East Asia – and is a veritable international, multi-cultural and multilingual task force.
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A ‘classic’ metaphor comes from the Italian – “traduttore, traditore”, which means “translator, traitor”. My teacher had written this phrase on the board in my first translation class, demonstrating her (rather cynical) philosophical stance on the whole project of translation – something is always ‘lost in translation’, and the translator necessarily interferes in this gap of meaning guided her own bias, conscious or unconscious, political or philosophical.
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In philosophy classes my charismatic and wildly esoteric professor once railed on about the possibility (or impossibility) of commensuration between various little narratives ( petits récits ), given the rejection of ‘modernist’ grand or meta-narratives. But translation, he declared dramatically, the possibility of translation hints at the possibility of commensurability between the little narratives. In his view, little narratives were understood as discrete cultures (Japanese, Iranian, Russian) and inter-cultural communication (and consequent kindness and friendliness amongst humankind) is only possible if translation is possible.
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Koh Choon Hwee
Victorian Literature, Statistically Analyzed With New Process - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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A decline in references to “God,” “Christian” and “universal” is consonant with the conventional view that the 19th century was a time of rising secularism and skepticism.
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Yet large searches can also challenge some pet theories of close reading, he said: for example, that the Victorians were obsessed with the nature and origins of evil. As it turns out, books with the word “evil” in the title bumped along near the bottom of the graph, accounting for less than 0.1 percent — a thousandth — of those published during the Victorian era.
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As Mr. Cohen is quick to acknowledge, the meaning of those numbers is anything but clear. Perhaps authors didn’t like to use the word “evil” in the title; perhaps there were other, more common synonyms; perhaps the context points to another subject altogether.
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A decline in references to "God," "Christian" and "universal" is consonant with the conventional view that the 19th century was a time of rising secularism and skepticism.
Victorian Literature, Statistically Analyzed With New Process - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The titles of every British book published in English in and around the 19th century — 1,681,161, to be exact — are being electronically scoured for key words and phrases that might offer fresh insight into the minds of the Victorians.
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This research, which has only recently become possible, thanks to a new generation of powerful digital tools and databases, represents one of the many ways that technology is transforming the study of literature, philosophy and other humanistic fields that haven’t necessarily embraced large-scale quantitative analysis.
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There is also anxiety, however, about the potential of electronic tools to reduce literature and history to a series of numbers, squeezing out important subjects that cannot be easily quantified.
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Do writers need paper? « Prospect Magazine - 0 views
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The digitisation of the reading experience itself is the least radical aspect of this process. Although a minority of titles offer sounds and images, most e-books ape their paper counterparts. Even on an advanced device like the iPad, the best reading applications emphasise clarity and clutter-free text. What’s truly new is the shift in power that the emerging order represents.
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Do writers need paper?
Balderdash: Stephen Fry on English, and Pedantry - 0 views
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Those once fashionable Frenchies designated them are Langue, language as an idea, and parole, language as utterance...
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The structuralists: one of their number, perhaps the best known, Roland Barthes, liked to use two words jouissance and plaisir. Le plaisir du texte. The pleasure of the text. Those who think structuralism spelt or spelled death to conscious art and such bourgeois comforts as style, accomplishment and enjoyment might be surprised that the pleasure of the text, the jouissance, the juicy joy of language, was important to Roland and his followers. Only to a dullard is language a means of communication and nothing more. It would be like saying sex is a means of reproduction and no more and food a means of fuelling and no more.
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What is considered "correct" language works very much like how Scientific theories get in vogue. When there's a Kuhnian paradigm shift - voilà, what was once wrong becomes right, and vice versa. That said, outside of the usual hunting grounds of pedants (who Fry is decrying), grammar has functions outside of being correct for the sake of being correct.
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Stephen Fry on English, and Pedantry
Lingua Franca | Is Bad Writing Necessary? - 0 views
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IS BAD WRITING NECESSARY? George Orwell, Theodor Adorno, and the Politics of Literature BY JAMES MILLER
- Clarity Is King -- Eric Adler on Postmodernists' Limpid Bursts - New Partis... - 0 views
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Clarity Is King -- Eric Adler on Postmodernists' Limpid Bursts 05.7.2004
A `Bad Writer' Bites Back - 0 views
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The journal, Philosophy and Literature, has offered itself as the arbiter of good prose and accused some of us of bad writing by awarding us "prizes."
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The targets, however, have been restricted to scholars on the left whose work focuses on topics like sexuality, race, nationalism and the workings of capitalism -- a point the news media ignored. Still, the whole exercise hints at a serious question about the relation of language and politics: why are some of the most trenchant social criticisms often expressed through difficult and demanding language?
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scholars in the humanities should be able to clarify how their work informs and illuminates everyday life. Equally, however, such scholars are obliged to question common sense, interrogate its tacit presumptions and provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world.
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A `Bad Writer' Bites Back By JUDITH BUTLER
YouTube - Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography - Language - 0 views
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Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography - Language
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Weiye Loh
Final year, final semester.