Close and Distant Reading of the Novel

The main goal of the course is to provide students with an overview of the development of the novel, to acquaint them with the basic form, type, genre and thematic characteristics of the novel and to train them for independent analysis and interpretation of the novels.
The aim of the course is to train students to understand the development of new approaches in literary studies.

Competences: students expand and deepen their knowledge in the field of literary methodology and novels. They are able to argue the advantages of individual methods and approaches, to connect their similarities and differences.

There are no enrolment or degree requirements for the course.

− Introductory lectures: What is distant reading, distant reading vs. traditional methods in literary studies, close reading.
− Novel: Periodization, stylistic, and typological aspects
− Lecture: Distant reading and digital humanities
− Seminar: Distant reading – case study: Franco Moretti, "Style, Inc. Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles (British Novels, 1740–1850)"
− Lecture: ELTeC Collection – European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC) definition of criteria, overview of collections of individual kinds of literature.
− Lecture: ELTeC as the starting point of research Thresholds to the “Great Unread”: Titling Practices in Eleven ELTeC Collections.
− Independent work: The student's independent work includes: reading selected novels in the Slovenian corpus of ELTeC.

Students master basic literary-historical concepts related to the novel. They are able to problematically deal with literary periods, directions, currents and other literary phenomena and to think critically about the relationship between these phenomena.

Students are acquainted with the approach of distant reading in literary science, they understand its specifics and are able to assess when the method is suitable for research. Their knowledge of the development of novels from the world literature is deepened.

• Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. E-version
• Janko Kos, Roman, Državna založba Slovenije: 1983. Catalogue
• Steven Moore Novel: An Alternative History. Vol. 1, Beginnings to 1600: Continuum, 2010. Vol. 2, 1600–1800: Bloomsbury, 2013).
• Franco Moretti, Distant reading, Verso: 2013. Catalogue
• Ted Underwood, “Distant Reading and the Blurry Edges of Genre”, 22 October 2014, [online], E-version
• Matthew Willkens, “Digital Humanities and its Application in the Study of Literature and Culture, Comparative Literature, 2015, 67/1, 11–20. https://doi.org/10.1215/00104124-2861911 E-version
• Set of studies based on the selection of novels discussed, which is determined before the start of the lecture.

Written exam.
(By continuously completing written assignments and actively participating in the seminar, students can obtain a 30% grade point average.)

Prof. dr. Katja Mihurko is a literary historian who incorporates the findings of the digital humanities into her approaches. is the leader of the Women Writers in History working group at the pan-European digital humanities network DARIAH Actively participates in the COST campaign Distant reading for European Literary History. She is the co-author of the article "Thresholds to the" Great Unread ": Titling Practices in Eleven ELTeC Collections" (currently in the process of review) and participated in the Slovenian edition of the ELTec collection.

Selected works:

• ERJAVEC, Tomaž, HLADNIK, Miran, JUVAN, Marko, MIHURKO PONIŽ, Katja. COST-ELTeC/ELTeC-slv: release with 94 novels in level 1 encoding. [CERN: Genève], 2019. 1 spletni vir. https://zenodo.org/record/3518109#.XuHpuudS-Ul.

• POLLAK, Senja, MARTINC, Matej, MIHURKO PONIŽ, Katja. Natural language processing for literary text analysis : word-embeddings-based analysis of Zofka Kvederʼs Work. V: JOSÉ FINATTO, Maria (ur.), POLLAK, Senja (ur.). Proceedings of the Workshop on Digital Humanities and Natural Language Processing (DHandNLP 2020), co-located with International Conference on the Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2020), Évora, Portugal, March 2nd, 2020, (CEUR workshop proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073, Vol. 2607). [S. l.]: CEUR-WS. cop. 2020, str. 1–9. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2607/paper4.pdf.

• MIHURKO PONIŽ, Katja. Digitalizacija literarne ustvarjalnosti: študija primera Zofke Kveder = Digitalisation of the literary creativity: a case study of Zofka Kveder. V: Digital humanities and Slavic cultural heritage: international scientific conference, Belgrade, 6–7 May 2019: [the book of summaries] = Digitalna humanistika i slovensko kulturno nasleće: međunarodna naučna konferencija, Beograd, 6. –7. maj 2019: [zbornik sažetaka]. Beograd: University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philology: = Univerzitet u Beogradu, Filološki fakultet. 2019, str. 27–28.

• MIHURKO PONIŽ, Katja, BOVCON, Narvika, TRAJANOV, Aneta, SMREKAR, Tina. Digitalizacija kulturne dediščine v dveh projektih programa Študentski inovativni projekti za družbeno korist. V: FIŠER, Darja (ur.), ERJAVEC, Tomaž (ur.). Jezikovne tehnologije in digitalna humanistika: zbornik konference : 24. –25. september 2020, Ljubljana, Slovenija = Proceedings of the Conference on Language Technologies and Digital Humanities: September 24th–25th 2020, Ljubljana, Slovenia. 1st ed. Ljubljana: Inštitut za novejšo zgodovino: = Institute of Contemporary History. 2020, str. 66–73, ilustr. http://nl.ijs.si/jtdh20/pdf/JT-DH_2020_Mihurko-Poniz-et-al_Digitalizacija-kulturne-dediscine-v-dveh-projektih-programa-Studentski.pdf.