This dissertation pursues a twofold proposition: writers of the long eighteenth century widely presumed that poetry influenced the “common weal” (the common wellbeing, conceived as a national community); and this expectation guided poetic composition even at the level of strategy or “design.” I demonstrate this claim in a series of three case studies, each of which delineates an elaborate, inte...

A number of perennial doubts plague genre theory. Are genres really 'out there' in the world, or are they merely the constructions of analysts? Is there a finite taxonomy of genres or are they in principle infinite? Are genres timeless Platonic essences or ephemeral, time-bound entities? Are genres culturebound or transcultural?... Should genre analysis be descriptive or proscriptive? (Stam 200...

Contemporary poetry appears in a diverse range of forms and medial constellations: in spoken word events live on stage, on audio CDs – spoken by the poets themselves or by professional speakers, at times accompanied by music or beats –, in YouTube videos, as entertaining ‘poetry clips,’ as artistic poetry films in art installations in museums, public spaces or the cinema. Finally, there is a wi...

Louis said from the grave, If I am Remembered, don't make me a sham Of a nice Jewish boy, Or the life of a goy (Not to shul [1], Christmas tree [2], and ate ham [3]). False biography would be a flaw-Don't recount what would stick in my craw And thus bring me to grief. For my spiritual brief Was Democracy. Ideas. The law. (It is clear to me that there's a God. Justice comes from Him. But it's no...

Rhetoricians since Aristotle have attempted to classify communications or documents into categories or “genres” with similar form, topic or purpose. This article surveys research on genre as it relates to Internet documents. The article briefly presents the concept of genre in general, and then reviews the evolution and emergence of genres on the Internet. It concludes with an examination of th...

We present the project of classification of Prague Discourse Treebank documents (Czech journalistic texts) for their genres. Our main interest lies in opening the possibility to observe how text coherence is realized in different types (in the genre sense) of language data and, in the future, in exploring the ways of using genres as a feature for multi-sentence-level language technologies. In t...

Our project aims at understanding text genres within the domain of the news. Advances in computational methods and availability of digital corpora has ushered in a new age of empirically testing intuitions about genres and styles, in particular the automatic classification of a document to its genre. At the same time, identifying systematic patterns of difference between genres, both quantitati...

In this paper, we demonstrate how a community may use genres for coordinating information. Genres help coordinate information related to resources, place and time since members in the community have enacted genres in the past and have expectations of the socially recognized information that genres bring. Using the HICSS website, we illustrate that genres are used for coordinating information ad...

This poster presentation is the culmination of an extensive statistical study of Latin elegy. The notion that poetic sound represents a distinct layer of information where discrete patterns can be found is an intriguing one. In a theoretical context, sound captures a "metalanguage" that is universal to all discourse, but only exposed in poetry. This poster develops a model for metalanguage and ...