The talk will report about problems and some results of doing literary history based on a corpus of German novels between 1750 and 1930. The history of literary texts can be told in many ways. Here the concept of genre is foregrounded. In order to model genres formally a mapping from literary concepts (like character) to notions from macroanalysis (like networks of character references) has to be done, but this is a fragile and error-prone process. Results from the first empirical tests on the other hand point to problems with the literary concepts which may have been constructed on a too small basis.

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact Elke Teich.