Speaker: Alvaro CEBALLOS VIRO @alvaroceb
Affiliation: Université de Liège
Title: Unveiling Private Anthologies: Exploring Lay Readers’ Poetic Repertoire
Abstract (long version below): For at least two hundred years, lay readers have been transcribing poems they considered emotionally or epistemologically relevant in notebooks. They did so for themselves, outside educational or institutional contexts. This poster will present a pilot study of seven such collections of Spanish poems dating from 1850 to 1930. They stem from private archives. We hypothesize that such collections feature specific semantic networks, providing insights into the lay readers’ poetic repertoire. We will compare the collections to a much larger control corpus and perform MFW and topic modeling analysis (with DARIAH TopicsExplorer).
Long abstract
For at least two hundred years, lay readers have been transcribing poems they considered to be emotionally or epistemologically relevant in notebooks. They did so for themselves, outside educational or institutional contexts. These private anthologies consisted of a number of heterogeneous texts, belonging to different periods and authors, and were instrumental for memorization, reflection, or public recitation. They were usually handwritten, rarely typewritten, and many of them present interesting textual variants of the poems, indicating that they were transcribed from memory (cf. the concept of mnemotheque; Botrel 2017).
These private anthologies can be described as modern chansonniers and are generally considered remote descendants of the late medieval songbooks. However, they belong to a radically different time and are akin to school practices, to intimate writing (some of them, in fact, take on structures resembling the diary), to collectibles (scrapbooks, broadside ballads sheets), to the Poesiealben (Walter 2019) and other ‘littératies familiales’ (Bonnery / Joigneux 2015). At the same time, they enter into dialogue with the practice of underlining (that is typical of extensive reading), as well as with the transcription of verbatim quotations in writers’ notebooks (Hébert 2016, Minzetanu 2016) and, more recently, in lay criticism on digital platforms like Goodreads.
These private anthologies of poems demonstrate well-known phenomena of reader response, such as the metonymic reduction of an extensive work to a number of passages or the attribution of particular personal relevance to those fragments – in our case, to specific poems. Otherwise, these cultural artifacts remain epistemically opaque, elude analysis, and have not yet received scholarly attention. We believe, however, that they provide a new perspective for the study of the empirical uses of poetry.
The poems collected in these notebooks often present a high degree of heterogeneity, raising interesting historiographical questions about the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous (Bloch 1985), about the different rhythms and strata of literary consumption (Santiáñez 2002), about the building of private, mixed, and transnational canons (Pozuelo / Aradra 2000). The time of transcription cannot always be accurately dated, and the same applies to many of the poems, since they derive not only from high literature, but also from popular poetry that was orally transmitted. Interestingly, the identity of the transcribers / owners is often prominently displayed on the title page or even at the bottom of each transcribed poem, as if he or she literally assumed not only the thoughts and the phrasing of the original authors, but also their authoritative position regarding the literary work.
This poster will present a pilot study of seven anthologies of Spanish poems dating from 1850 to 1930. They stem from private archives. We hypothesize that such collections feature specific semantic networks, providing insights into the lay readers’ poetic repertoire. This may concern the prevalence of sentimental themes or emotionally intense experiences (contrasting with a control corpus of printed works and Hispanic poetry anthologies from the same period). Identifying the themes of private anthologies would be a compelling way to determine the popular uses and everyday functions of poetry.
To this end, we will begin by submitting digitized copies of the studied collections to Transkribus, and then, using a self-trained algorithm in order to obtain standardized transcriptions, we will do the same with part of the control corpus. After lemmatizing both the control and experimental corpus and running a most-frequent-word analysis on Python, we will submit both corpora to the DARIAH TopicsExplorer (bearing in mind Blevins 2010, Henny et al. 2016, Herrmann et al. 2023). This procedure proves particularly suitable for numerous but relatively short sets of text, as is the case here.
The pilot study aims to lay the theoretical and methodological foundations and to anticipate the main issues for a subsequent larger study with MALLET, including private collections of poems from a growing digital Spanish corpus — which could eventually be extended to other languages.
The contribution of this study is twofold: on the one hand, it unveils an unexplored type of material for the empirical study of reader response; on the other hand, testing semantic text mining techniques aims to objectify and quantify the specificity of this type of documents, which are not reception texts strictly speaking, but individual and discretional selections of primary texts endowed with a transcendent meaning.
References
BLEVINS, Cameron (2010): «Topic Modeling Martha Ballard’s Diary», Historying, http://historying.org/2010/04/01/topic-modeling-martha-ballards-diary/ .
BLOCH, Ernst (1985 [1962]): Erbschaft dieser Zeit, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
BONNERY, Stéphane / JOIGNEUX, Claude (2015): «Des littératies familiales inégalement rentables scolairement», Le Français aujourd’hui, 190.3, 23-34.
BOTREL, Jean-François (2017): «De la mnemoteca a la biblioteca del pueblo», in: Calvo, Florencia / Chicote, Gloria B. (eds.): Buenos Aires - Madrid - Buenos Aires. Homenaje a Melchora Romanos, Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 643-655.
ESCOLANO, Agustín (2000): «La copie de manuscrits comme pratique scolaire d’appropriation et ses usages de l’écriture», in: Christine Barré-De Miniac (ed.): Copie et modèle: usages, transmission, appropriation de l’écrit, Nancy: Institut National de Recherche Pédagogique, pp. 41-56.
HÉBERT, Sophie C. (2016): «Le carnet d’écrivain au XXe siècle: forme originelle, forme terminale», Variations, 24, 91-103.
HENNY, Ulrike / CALVO TELLO, José / SCHLÖR, Daniel / SCHÖCH, Christof (2016): «Topic, Genre, Text. Topics im Textverlauf von Untergattungen des spanischen und hispanoamerikanischen Romans (1880-1930)», DHd-Tagung, Univ. Leipzig, http://www.dhd2016.de/abstracts/vorträge-055.html
HERRMANN, J. Berenike et al. (2023): «Tool Criticism in Practice. On Methods, Tools and Aims of Computational Literary Studies», Digital Humanities Quarterly, 017.2.
MINZETANU, André (2016): Carnets de lecture. Généalogie d’une pratique littéraire, Vincennes: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes.
POZUELO YVANCOS, José María / ARADRA, Rosa María (2000): Teoría del canon y literatura española, Madrid: Cátedra.
SANTIÁÑEZ, Nil (2002): «Temporalidad y discurso histórico», in: Investigaciones literarias. Modernidad, historia de la literatura y modernismos, Barcelona: Crítica, pp. 51-85.
WALTER, Stefan (2019): Der Staat und die Werte: Wertwandel in Poesiealben in der DDR und Bundesrepublik 1949–1989, Wiesbaden: Springer VS.