Victorious Roman Emperors followed a kill first policy when dealing with perceived threats. They ordered the execution of surrendered combatants, political leaders, women, children, and even friends. The emperor Severus followed standard protocol...
Our bipartite Literary analysis of Yukio Mishima's Sea of Fertility tetralogy concludes this month. We further illustrate how Mishima's post-Meiji Japan teens capture timeless realities of the human journey. Last month, we discussed how his...
Yukio Mishima's Sea of Fertility tetralogy includes themes of reincarnation, futility, inevitably, and tradition. The novels follow the life of Shigekuni Honda and his peers in post-Meiji Japan. Even though Mishima's teens faced adolescence one...
I augment traditional literary analysis with Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to compare Fyodor Dostoevsky's Rodion Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment) with Ayn Rand's Howard Roark (The Fountainhead). Tools include both the Google Cloud...
The domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP) provides novel tools for Literary analysis. Analysts use NLP tools to record sentiment, emotional intensity, and word frequencies. Today I use NLP techniques to extract Raskolnikov's speaking (and...
In May 2023 Generative AI still disappoints in writing compelling literary analysis "from scratch." The output reads thin and lacks hard evidence. Today I instead measure Generative AI's effectiveness in assisting with literary analysis. I...
In this blog post I write an entry for the (now defunct) Faux Faulkner Contest. I first write Humpty Dumpty in the voice of William Faulkner. I then command Generative AI to write an entry for the contest and compare the results. You can read my...
Hopkins refers to a “year” of “done darkness.” 1885 marks this year, the year Hopkins wrote “[Carrion Comfort].” For Hopkins, 1885 includes “encroaching derangement” that consumes him (Harris 12). Harris calls Hopkins’ situation “a recurrence of...
The City fuels Hopkins' sense of failure. The City provokes him to lose faith in himself and Humankind. Hopkins’ lack of faith in Humanity leads to feelings of inadequacy in his vocation. A Priest must focus on his fellow man’s spiritual...
Speaking of his “Terrible Sonnets,” Gerard Manley Hopkins suggests in a letter that “if ever anything is written in blood one of these is” (Bridges 219). The poems recount Hopkins' tumultuous examination of the pain and ambivalence that defines...