/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22992849]

>The academics put more than 100 works of world literature, by authors from Charles Dickens to Shakespeare, Alexandre Dumas, Thomas Mann, Umberto Eco and Samuel Beckett, through a detailed statistical analysis. Looking at sentence lengths and how they varied, they found that in an “overwhelming majority” of the studied texts, the correlations in variations of sentence length were governed by the dynamics of a cascade – meaning that their construction is a fractal: a mathematical object in which each fragment, when expanded, has a structure resembling the whole.
>Fractals are used in science to model structures that contain re-occurring patterns, including snowflakes and galaxies.
>“All of the examined works showed self-similarity in terms of organisation of the lengths of sentences. Some were more expressive – here The Ambassadors by Henry James stood out – others to far less of an extreme, as in the case of the French 17th-century romance Artamene ou le Grand Cyrus. However, correlations were evident, and therefore these texts were the construction of a fractal,” said Dr Paweł Oświęcimka from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, one of the authors of the new paper Quantifying Origin and Character of Long-range Correlations in Narrative Texts.
>Some works, however, were more mathematically complex than others, with stream-of-consciousness narratives the most complex, comparable to multifractals, or fractals of fractals. Finnegans Wake, the scientists found, was the most complex of all.
>“The absolute record in terms of multifractality turned out to be Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. The results of our analysis of this text are virtually indistinguishable from ideal, purely mathematical multifractals,” said Professor Stanisław Drożdż, another author of the paper, which has just been published in the computer science journal Information Sciences.
>Joyce himself, reported to have said he wrote Finnegans Wake “to keep the critics busy for 300 years”, might have predicted this. In a letter about the novel, Work in Progess as he then knew it, he told Harriet Weaver: “I am really one of the greatest engineers, if not the greatest, in the world besides being a musicmaker, philosophist and heaps of other things. All the engines I know are wrong. Simplicity. I am making an engine with only one wheel. No spokes of course. The wheel is a perfect square. You see what I’m driving at, don’t you? I am awfully solemn about it, mind you, so you must not think it is a silly story about the mouse and the grapes. No, it’s a wheel, I tell the world. And it’s all square."
APOLOGIZE
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/27/scientists-reveal-multifractal-structure-of-finnegans-wake-james-joyce

[Anonymous No.22992990]

>>22992849
I mean I imagine most here would balk at seeing literature as a technical or even mathematical exercise but I think it's an interesting way to examine it.

[Anonymous No.22993002]

>the academics
Stopped reading right there. Wasted a thread, OP

[Anonymous No.22993013]

>>22992849
so what?

[Anonymous No.22993020]

>>22992849
Does the paper describe more about how they analyzed sentence length?
Also, how does complexity in this way contribute to prose, flow, any of those things? On one side of the spectrum you could say writing where every sentence is simple with the same number of words would be incredibly dull. But does complexity at the level of Finnegan's Wake or beyonds, is that divine or is it excess?

[Anonymous No.22993021]

STEMfags are soÿfacing at this “research.” Retarded nonsense.

[Anonymous No.22993024]

Good job, OP. We needed a new thread after what happened to the last one, which was actually good.

Word of advice: ignore anyone that starts harping on about reddit, McCarthy and trannies. They will absolutely derail the thread and contribute no actual substance of worth. Why they chose a really good Joyce thread to derail when it's obvious they don't read, I have no idea.

[Anonymous No.22993025]

>>22993024
Nice reddit spacing, bud. Maybe you should go back, you sensitive faggot.

[Anonymous No.22993036]

>>22993025
What are you crying about?

[Anonymous No.22993049]

>>22993036
Kek reddit retorts are predictable

[Anonymous No.22993050]

>>22992990
It's an interesting way to examine it, but doing it consciously never produces anything of value.

[Anonymous No.22993054]

>>22993049
Sorry, what did I say to upset you so much?

[Anonymous No.22993089]

>>22992849
>bros... there's like MATHS in my pledditslop
I'm sure pseudo-intellectuals all over the world re-joice.

[Anonymous No.22993112]

>>22992849
I would need to see what a really bad/simple book like a romance novel looks like with the same model to confirm if this means anything. I'm sure there is a way to project a fractal image from any set of data

[Anonymous No.22993124]

>>22993049
Reddit's cool, you lil lit 4fucker. It's our site and your grave!

[Anonymous No.22993148]

>>22992849
>long chapters with long paragraphs with long sentences with long words
>Oh! My Science! It's so cool and fractal, I dont even have to read the book anymore!

[Anonymous No.22993196]

>>22992849
What the fuck does that even mean

[Anonymous No.22993221]

>>22993024
>reddit spacing
Tranny spotted. McCarthy was right.

[Anonymous No.22993226]

>>22993221
You’ve already used that one, mr. redditor.

[Anonymous No.22993228]

>>22992849
Actual philistinism. I'm appalled.

[Anonymous No.22993233]

>>22992849
Pseud as fuck.

[Anonymous No.22993245]

>>22993024
Was he the one who admitted to likeing transvestitism or something?

[Anonymous No.22993279]

>>22993245
Yeah, pretty much. He likes crossdressers and transvestites but not transgenders.

[Anonymous No.22993292]

>>22993279
kek, of course…degenerates these days

[Anonymous No.22993301]

Why are you people so dedicated to derailing Joyce threads in particular? I'm finding it difficult to think of a motive.

[Anonymous No.22993310]

>>22993301
Maybe if you replied to the right posts.

[Anonymous No.22993564]

>>22993301
It's because there's nothing to talk about with Joyce's books, so like the guy itself everything is about the social drama.

[Anonymous No.22993618]

Of course there isn't anything to talk about, you've never read them.

[Anonymous No.22993672]

>>22993618
No one except a tiny handful of ultra-autists have. It's the type of books pledditors buy to put on their bookshelf to collect dust.

[Anonymous No.22993701]

>>22992849
When did this board become occupied by STEMfags?

[Anonymous No.22993734]

This could have been a thread about the merits of stream-of-conciousness novels by the modernists, but you faggots always knee-jerk to everything when a single number is involved. Not everyone who enjoys books has a book reading degree.
>>22993672
/lit/ did a Ulysses read along already--not that long ago either--you retarded newfag. It is no stretch of the imagination that /lit/ has also read FW, which has been on /lit/'s top 100 list for years.

[Anonymous No.22993782]

>>22993734
>/lit/ did a Ulysses read along already--not that long ago either--you retarded newfag
That's what I said; a tiny handful of ultra-autists.

[Anonymous No.22994690]

That Joyce quote makes him sound like a character in a Moomins book

[Anonymous No.22994727]

>>22992849
>No, it’s a wheel, I tell the world. And it’s all square.
I am a FW enjoyer, but what did he mean by this?

[Anonymous No.22994746]

I´ve been away from this site for about 10 years I believe.

Already this is the worst thread I have ever seen (aside from gore and stuff like that). Is it all like this?

[Anonymous No.22994750]

>>22994727
that he's reinvented the literary wheel because the original was too round

[Anonymous No.22994943]

>>22994750
Makes sense. I'm retarded.

[Anonymous No.22995116]

>>22994727
Consider the symbolism of the square and the circle, as well as the symbol of the wheel. Without the slightest bit of irony, Guenon might shed light on this.

[Anonymous No.22995127]

>>22995116
lmao

[Anonymous No.22995169]

>>22993672
>No one except a tiny handful of ultra-autists have
That's an interesting way of telling us that you're too stupid to read his books

[Anonymous No.22995180]

>>22994727
The old alchemical riddle of squaring the circle.

>>22993196
>what the fuck does that mean?
The article itself helps, the summary given here didn’t shed that much light on it. Here’s some diagrams given, this one has the caption: “Sequences of sentence lengths (as measured by number of words) in four books, representative of various degrees of cascading character.”

Here is the phenomenon of cascades (a mathematical terms) being described: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplicative_cascade

> In mathematics, a multiplicative cascade is a fractal/multifractal distribution of points produced via an iterative and multiplicative random process.

The academics write in their paper that: “Studying characteristics of the sentence-length variability in a large corpus of world famous literary texts shows that an appealing and aesthetic optimum … involves self-similar, cascade-like alternations of various lengths of sentences.”

“An overwhelming majority of the studied texts simply obey such fractal attributes but especially spectacular in this respect are hypertext-like, ‘stream-of-consciousness’ novels. In addition, they appear to develop structures characteristic of irreducibly interwoven sets of fractals called multifractals.”

So I believe what’s being claimed here is if you take given arbitrary sections of these graphs shown, it’ll be self-similar to the general pattern of the entire graph representing sentence-lengths in that book.

[Anonymous No.22995185]

>talentless hacks trying to figure out how to use this research to convince monkey-see, monkey-do ai models how to "write books"

[Anonymous No.22995197]

>>22995180
interesting

[Anonymous No.22995200]

>>22995180
Multifractal analysis of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce: the graph shape is virtually indistinguishable from the results for purely mathematical multifractals. The horizontal axis represents the degree of singularity, while the vertical axis shows the spectrum of singularity.

This is really interesting.

[Anonymous No.22995205]

>>22993301
Like 75% of this board is /pol/tards and zoomer tradcath discord spammer who don't actually read literature, and just use the board to larp as "intellectual", and a significant amount of the posters who do read don't read anything serious.

[Anonymous No.22995210]

>>22995205
wow thats crazy guess you can leave them

[Nuvoletta No.22995218]

Then Nuvoletta reflected for the last time in her little long life and she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one. She cancelled all her engauzements. She climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy cloudy cry: Nuée! Nuée! A lightdress fluttered. She was gone. And into the river that had been a stream (for a thousand of tears had gone eon her and come on her and she was stout and struck on dancing and her muddied name was Missisliffi) there fell a tear, a singult tear, the loveliest of all tears (I mean for those crylove fables fans who are ‘keen’ on the prettypretty commonface sort of thing you meet by hopeharrods) for it was a leaptear. But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping as though her heart was brook…

[Anonymous No.22995253]

>>22993024
I'm not surprised a chuds are obsessed with trangenders. The South is notoriously into shemale porn

[Anonymous No.22995274]

OKAY BUT WHERE'S THE FUCKING PAPER

[Anonymous No.22995286]

>>22992849
I subscribe to Tolstoyan views of art and Joyce is the antithesis of it. I see no worth in something like Finnegan’s Wake.

[Anonymous No.22995332]

>>22993024
>>22993245
>>22993279
>t. thinks a tranny book is a masterpiece

[Anonymous No.22995338]

>>22995169
Absolutely. Just like I'm too stupid to appreciate someone throwing red paint on a canvas or pissing in a jar and calling it art, I'm also too stupid to appreciate post-modern stream of consciousness fart huffery, I readily admit it.

[Anonymous No.22995357]

>>22995205
>don't read anything serious
Like... the quran or something? What's serious?

[Anonymous No.22995367]

>>22992849
shitty dialogue about irish perversion is a fractal! Science my apes!!

[Anonymous No.22995386]

>>22995286
>Tolstoyan views of art
Whats that?

[Anonymous No.22995389]

>>22995386
The views of art that Tolstoy had

[Anonymous No.22995392]

>>22995389
fuck off, groucho

[Anonymous No.22995435]

>>22995180
So this is how these fractals look like? Looks like random noise.
And the conclusion is that the books are good because they have good
and varied sentence lengths? But have they tested for the contrary, i.e. analysing bad books, to see their structure as well? Perhaps the pattern is inherent to human writing and not just to good literature.
They recognise the supposedly good fractal-like pattern in the famously overlong 'Grand cyrus', whose high aesthetic quality is not at all asserted by the few people who managed to read it. It's an 18th century soap opera in text, from what I've heard. Yet it has the good fractal?

[Anonymous No.22995517]

>>22995435
Pareidolia.

[Anonymous No.22995533]

>>22995286
Tolstoy wasn't even a real artist.

[Anonymous No.22995541]

>>22995533
b8

[Anonymous No.22995570]

>>22995435
>They recognise the supposedly good fractal-like pattern in the famously overlong 'Grand cyrus', whose high aesthetic quality is not at all asserted by the few people who managed to read it. It's an 18th century soap opera in text, from what I've heard. Yet it has the good fractal?

In fact, it was mentioned as having this to “far less of an extreme” than Henry James’s The Ambassadors, yet still having it to some degree:

> All of the examined works showed self-similarity in terms of organisation of the lengths of sentences. Some were more expressive – here The Ambassadors by Henry James stood out – others to far less of an extreme, as in the case of the French 17th-century romance Artamene ou le Grand Cyrus.

> So this is how these fractals look like? Looks like random noise.
Because those are some simple ones on Wikipedia just meant to express the basic mathematical definition of them.

It’s a little “DUDE MESCALINE LMAO”, as cynics/skeptics/douchebags here might put it, but here’s a(n) (arbitrarily limited) depiction of the Mandelbrot Set, a mathematical entity which displays fractal features. So fractals can also be rather “beautiful” —… if you even trust that word. The word “beautiful”. After all, if you’re skeptical enough about everything, even “beauty” and “meaning” are simply “made-up”, “subjective”, and “unscientific concepts”.

“Show me hard proof and the scientific studies which prove objective beauty exists,” the scientist might go, after all.

But, anyway, I still think there’s something potentially fascinating going on here, despite my own skepticism of such “scientism”, science-worship, dead blind worship of concepts like “pure rationality”, “mathematics”, “SCIENCE!”, etc. as I hope my post has already made clear. Nevertheless, the beauty, intricateness, consistency, and complexity of some of the sciences and of mathematics, or of their findings/discoveries, and how perfectly and consistently they often seem to match to some real-world empirical phenomena, does itself offer a sort of transcendental experience for those blessed enough to be able to be turned on by understanding of some of it. I admit I’ve never had the bone for fascination in the hard sciences and mathematics, although I performed reasonably well in these subjects in school when I applied myself to them. But, nevertheless, I don’t begrudge the truly great, authentic, passionate scientists and mathematicians their discoveries and the joy they have in their discoveries.

(Faggot 4chan mods/admins/programmers won’t let me post a file “larger than 4MB”, so here’s the link of the full gif I wanted to post to of a partial zoom-in on the Mandelbrot Set: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Mandelbrot_sequence_new.gif))

[Anonymous No.22995687]

>>22995435
The study wasn't measuring "good", it was measuring complexity by analyzing sentence length. But it found some correlations with some writing styles and complexity. It also found that authors organize their overall work with a similar cadence to chapters and paragraphs. That is not entirely surprising, because stock market research demonstrated a long time ago that market curves, which track human emotion in terms of price level, also are shaped similarly regardless of the timescale you inspect. What that says to me is that this fractal is the fingerprint of a human being working on something, engaging a manuscript from many perspectives.

[Anonymous No.22995696]

>>22995687
>of a human being
you could have just said person but i guess that's not the umbrella you like to sell

[Anonymous No.22995709]

>>22995687
> It also found that authors organize their overall work with a similar cadence to chapters and paragraphs. That is not entirely surprising, because stock market research demonstrated a long time ago that market curves, which track human emotion in terms of price level, also are shaped similarly regardless of the timescale you inspect
Explain this like I’m a retard

[Anonymous No.22995712]

>>22995709
consumer confidence is when someone is happy to pay, so they do

[Anonymous No.22995713]

>>22995709
Dont think too much into that. Its just bunch of nerd söyentist trying to rationalize everything with their manmade theory.

[Anonymous No.22995830]

>>22995696
Pedantic.

[Anonymous No.22995845]

>>22995709
>the curve
Price levels track confidence levels the same way that trust works in you mind—we lose trust faster than we gain it.
The market goes down 1.5x faster on average than it goes up, which is why large institutions strategize off of shorting more than a typical investor. This 1:1.5 ratio is true on average in every timescale.
>the timescale
Imagine you are a day trader. You are going to trade once a day and you view charts that give you price levels relevant to that day. Now imagine if you are a swing trader, or a longer term trader. They trade less frequently and use different scaled charts. But they make the same decisions.
When a writer constructs a story, he is also going to analyze his manuscript similarly, even on subconscious level. It doesn't matter whether he's comparing the flow between two chapters, or between two paragraphs. He tends to do it in a similar fashion that is unique to his psychology.

[Anonymous No.22995856]

>>22992849
The whole Universe is one body breathing in fractal complexity.

[Anonymous No.22996570]

okay but wheres the paper

[Anonymous No.22996593]

>>22993112

[Anonymous No.22996646]

>>22992849
Fart!

[Anonymous No.22996651]

>>22993024
t. transsexual redditor

[Anonymous No.22996658]

>HOLY HECKIN SCIENCE THIS IS SOOOOO COOL
>I LOVE THAT STEM CAN EXPLAIN LITERATURE SCIENTIFICALLY AND MATHEMATICALLY
>DUDE THIS IS SO HECKIN COOL
tranny thread

[Anonymous No.22996704]

>>22996658
No one said this. You are making it up in your wojak'd head.

[Anonymous No.22996848]

>>22995845
thats just like, your theory man. just cause it sounds good doesnt mean youre right.

[Anonymous No.22996891]

>>22992849
I hate STEMfags so much bros...

[Anonymous No.22997006]

>>22996704
They also didn't say anything else, not how they measured this supposed fractality or what the intellecutal added value is of doing that.
Honestly it might be smthg like "Oooh Henry James used long sentences which also use long words, that's such amazing self-similarity, le data science just takes my breath away everytime!!"

[Anonymous No.22997157]

>>22997006
It’s been explained in more depth in the article and the relevant sections of that article posted in this thread, you can’t even read it coherently or with a minimum of patience (a 10 minute read at most, maybe, or just a few minutes if you read the relevant excerpted passages in this thread). The graphs showing sentence-lengths in those books display a fractal self-similarity, which means that if you take significant enough zoomed-in arbitrary cross-sections of these graphs (representing a section of the book), they’ll often display a similarity to the pattern of alternations of sentence-lengths that goes on in the whole book, which they likened to the mathematical definition of a cascade, an entity that shows fractal properties.

> what the intellecutal added value is of doing that.
It has some very interesting implications that touch on both literature and neuroscience. It would be unlikely verging on impossible that authors did this consciously; yet, the researchers nevertheless found that many renowned works of literature display this fractal cascade-pattern in sentence-lengths, most particularly stream-of-consciousness novels, and most spectacularly Finnegans Wake (which also arguably employs its own form of stream-of-consciousness/dreamlike free association Joyce was using). So it appears there’s something we find intuitively aesthetic, or engrained in the nature of our thoughts (stream of consciousness, free association, etc.), which display these fractal cascade-like patterns of sentences alternating longer and shorter in a specific wavelike fashion.

And as shown here, FW’s pattern of sentence-lengths fit particularly almost perfectly with the mathematical definition of a multifractal: >>22995200.

Fractals (a simple definition: recursive self-similar structures) are found in all sorts of phenomena throughout nature, on both grand and small scales. From flowers, leaves and trees, to conch shells, to the connection of neurons in the brain, to shorelines, to the shape of galaxies. I think it’s pretty cool and they can be aesthetically neat to look at.

Another source:
> Fractals are complex, but more complexity results when many fractals are irreducibly interwoven into structures called multifractals. A multifractal is not simply a sum of fractals: it cannot be divided to yield the original components, because the way they interweave is fractal in nature. In a sense, it is a fractal of fractals.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/fractal-fiction-measuring-the-sentences-in-joyce-s-finnegans-wake-1.3110954

Being so anti-intellectual and smug about some data scientists/mathematicians actually displaying an interdisciplinary interest in great literature is a bad look to me, not everything is about “STEMfags vs. based c/lit/erati.”

[Anonymous No.22997210]

>all the responses saying nothing, just scoffing and dismissing
Why is /lit/ so filled with anti-intellectuals? Zero intellectual curiosity of any kind to be found in some of you. Pathetically lazy.

[Anonymous No.22997220]

>>22997157
Rhythm is pleasing, more news at 11.

[Anonymous No.22997244]

>>22997220
>Rhythm is pleasing
Wouldn’t be surprised that this is the first time these retarded STEM losers discovered what rhythm actually is. They probably watched some YouTube Vox explanation video to understand it

[Anonymous No.22997319]

>>22997157
>Being so anti-intellectual and smug about some data scientists/mathematicians actually displaying an interdisciplinary interest in great literature
And I will continue to be this way, because it is exactly this spirit of quant/data/neuro/engineering-inspired analysis that gives birth to the typical writing "advice" of today, which results in heaps of interchangeable NYT-bestseller slop that make up our soulless literary landscape.
And btw, the most basic fractal shape is a straight line, which is perfectly self-similar no matter how much you zoom in. With the sentence lengths, a book where all sentences have the same number of words would be fractal too.

[Anonymous No.22997320]

>>22992990
If you do not have technical mastery, you can never claim to be an artist. Art is craft and intention. That is why Picasso is art while monkey shit on a canvas is not
Commodity is another thing. That is whatever you can get someone to pay for your shit on a canvas

[Anonymous No.22997363]

>>22997210
Unfortunately this is 4chan, and not Metafilter.

[Anonymous No.22998020]

>>22995200
>>22995435
>>22995570

They are just finding patterns in nothing. Where is the control??? I can have ChatGPT shoot out a bunch of shit, and whoa, lo and behold, a pattern!

This is like those cranks that once wrote a book called The Bible Code where the "decoded" Bible predicted everything that ever happened, including Trotsky getting assasinated with a pickaxe.

[Anonymous No.22998101]

>>22997319
Take your meds dude. The writing advice of today is just the opposite of the complexity that paper focuses on. No, in fact the industry hammers Hemingway-like Writing Workshops.
Also, notice how the article never said that it had anything to do with "good writing". You made that up in your schizo brain because you are insecure. The study was never meant to make writing better, nor does it venture to say complexity governs quality. Your claim about the information being meaningless shows how poor of a reader you are and that you can't even learn what a fractal is, what bounds and singularities are, even in a technical paper about it. What makes them different from another are those parameters and they give rise to the aforementioned complexity, not the mere quality of being fractals.
Even if the paper did suggest that complexity meant good literature, that doesn't mean that everyone would write like that because publishers know that the mass market is not actually going to read Finnegan's Wake copies every month. If anything, the paper would suggest that every writer organizes stories differently.
By the way, the article was published 8 years ago. Just admit you are a pseud and move on.

[Anonymous No.22998144]

>>22992990
10-20% of literature is abstract form.
80-90% is feelings and ideas.
But that 20% remains important.

[Anonymous No.22998191]

>>22992849
You litfaggots all spend each day sucking the subhuman scum out from the flabby folds of each other’s deflated penises. This guy is pretentious as all shit. He’s just Punished Col. Sanders

[Anonymous No.22998203]

>>22992849
Also, where’s God on the list of authors?
>muh atheist philosophy means I can’t say muh “omg” or “what the hell” because those can’t exist

[Anonymous No.22999317]

>>22997210
I responded with what I consider to be relatively serious objections to how the study was conducted. Without redoing the study in a better way, there's nothing more to discuss.

>>22998101
>notice how the article never said that it had anything to do with "good writing".
>>22995180
>Studying characteristics of the sentence-length variability in a large corpus of world famous literary texts shows that an appealing and aesthetic optimum … involves self-similar, cascade-like alternations of various lengths of sentences.
>>>>>an appealing and aesthetic optimum

[Anonymous No.22999353]

>>22993024
Based

[Anonymous No.22999554]

How come there are no more writers like Joyce?

[Anonymous No.22999650]

>>22999554
Decline of the west, the present age can not longer produce men like him, it's all downhill from here anon

[Anonymous No.22999751]

>>22999554
McCarthy died recently. Or do you mean writers writing books like his?