This analysis of monologues and dialogues in narrative text addresses the question of who is narrating (a narrator or a character), how he or she is narrating (the narrative process within discourse), and what is narrated (the content of the speech). It presents ways of conveying an individual character’s speech and thought, which are combined into various speech, dialogue, and monologue interactions. The analysis of texts from older Slovenian literature reveals various roles of monologue and dialogue.
COBISS.SI-ID: 45801773
The first original Slovenian story, Sreča v nesreči (Fortune in Misfortune), was published by Janez Cigler in 1836. Slovenian literature specialists have ascribed major influence on its creation to the works of the Bavarian writer Christoph von Schmid, not only in terms of its content, structure, concept, and narrative style, but also in following the spirit of the time and its regard for tradition. These researchers primarily focused on comparisons of content, but not on analyses of similarities in style. The Stylo package in the statistical software environment R for advanced stylistic analyses of text collections was therefore used to perform a stylometric analysis of Cigler’s works and Schmid’s translated works, as well as some translations of narrative prose from the period studied. Given certain limitations—such as the limited volume of texts, translated and original literature, and genre diversity—the analysis confirms Cigler’s original style rather than an imitation of Schmid, raising new questions regarding the authorship of certain works.
COBISS.SI-ID: 45731075
Rapid development of the humanities and its methods was primarily facilitated by constantly increasing computer power and the possibility of creating extensive corpuses of machine-readable texts that allow distant reading. Despite the theoretical views that distant reading should replace close reading, research confirms that relevant quantitative analysis can only be performed based on familiarity with the findings of traditional literary history. As a quantitative statistical analysis of style or comparison of texts based on measurable characteristics, stylometry not only offers insight into a specific style segment but also makes it possible to look at a larger text collection that also includes non-canonized texts, the importance of which has also been highlighted by other directions in literature research. The visualization of results of the stylometric analysis of Slovenian narrative literature from the first half of the seventeenth century to the first original Slovenian narrative of 1836 shows the development of Slovenian narrative literature by period, with identifiable hallmarks of certain authors and, within individual periods, genres. Certain links indicate a need for further research.
COBISS.SI-ID: 61688323
Dating from the late eighteenth century, the Poljane Manuscript is one of the more recent and more important discoveries in the ongoing systematic collection of lesser known and unknown manuscript texts of old Slovenian literature, and as such is an interesting subject of methodologically diverse analyses. The text is an example of the baroque tradition of describing the life and, in particular, the sufferings of Jesus Christ, and is specifically related to the work of the famous German baroque writer Martin of Cochem. In the tradition of scholarly critical editions of Slovenian manuscripts, the so-called critical transcript has become established. While also being an interpretation of the manuscript, the transcript is intended to bring the text closer to the contemporary reader by means of modern lettering, as well as providing a basis for further language analysis. When interpreting and analysing the language of texts from distant periods, we must take into account the language situation and the level of language development, so that individual text renderings can be appropriately categorised as normal or acceptable variants, scribal errors, or renderings that cannot be unambiguously defined as normal or incorrect. Taking the Poljane Manuscript as an example, we show the factors that must be taken into account in a critical assessment, while also presenting the editorial solutions adopted in the scholarly digital edition as suggested by the TEI Guidelines.
COBISS.SI-ID: 56521475
The volume Izhodišča slovenske pripovedne proze (The Bases of Slovenian Narrative Prose) builds upon recent research to provide new insights into the narrative tradition in the history of Slovenian literature up to the first original Slovenian narrative. Janez Cigler’s narrative Sreča v nesreči (Fortune in Misfortune), published in 1836, is a starting point from which it looks at the past and concurrent Slovenian narrative tradition, using the polysystem theory, culturology-oriented translation theories, and current research in Slovenian literary studies to observe the development of the Slovenian narrative literature system and establish how at a key point in this development Sreča v nesreči as a “translation without an original” caused original narrative prose to enter the center of the system and thus acquired the status of a canonized text. A computational textual criticism analysis of various editions of Sreča v nesreči is used to demonstrate how the current version of the text has changed and become established. Traditional approaches used in literary studies are complemented by stylometric analysis (distant reading). Quantitative analysis largely confirmed the findings about stylistic similarities and historical style periods, while also indicating incorrectly attributed authorships and areas worth reexamining.
COBISS.SI-ID: 62738179