STEPHEN NAOYUKI MATSUBA Masters Thesis | Ph.

D Dissertation

The Play of Reason and Discourse: Intertextual Theory, Cognitive Science, Computational Linguistics, and Identifying Allusions in the Works of Shakespeare Graduate Programme in English, York University Sheila Embleton (York University) and Richard Hillman (University of Western Ontario), supervisors

According to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, an allusion is a "[t]acit reference to another literary work, to another art, to history, to contemporary figures, or the like" (Miner). The traditional assumption underlying this literary device has the author consciously drawing on various sources and influences to construct the "reference" as a means of controlling the reading of the text. Therefore, to identify a passage as an allusion is, in effect, to privilege authorial intention. In contrast, poststructural literary theories speak not of sources and influences, but of intertext and intertextuality. These terms have a variety of meanings but I would like to focus on Riffaterre's, which defines the former as "one or more texts which the reader must know in order to understand a work of literature in terms of its overall significance" and the latter as "the web of functions that constitutes and regulates the relationships between text and intertext" ("Compulsory Reader Response" 56 and 57). Moreover, he asserts that "the one and only original meaning of a text is the one given to it by its first readers (whether or not that meaning coincides with the author's intention)" (Text Production 105), thereby reducing the notion of intentionality to a myth constructed by the reader. Under this paradigm, the author no longer controls meaning, but is subject to the cultural, political, and temporal environment of the reader. It is now time to re-examine the concept of allusion in a poststructural climate. Unlike earlier studies of allusion, which have been the product of scholars cataloging and analysing what they considered to be allusions in the texts, this dissertation will examine the processes which various critics have used to identify allusions and will discuss the implications of this device for intertextual theory. An allusion is "found" when some aspect of the combination of words within a passage triggers the critic to perceive a connection between it and another text, and to find significance in that connection. Therefore, I will not discuss allusion as an exclusively literary or linguistic phenomenon but as a synthesis of the two approaches. My goal is to develop an outline for a computational linguistic model of allusion that deals with the concerns of poststructuralist literary theory.

The dissertation will be divided into an introduction and four subsequent chapters. The introductory chapter will begin with an historical overview of how allusion has been defined and then will establish the aims and focus of the remainder of the dissertation. The next chapter will examine how literary theory has defined the concept and processes of allusion. I will outline the studies of allusion done by Ziva Ben-Porat, Gian Biagio Conte, John Hollander, and Carmela Perri and will explore their relevance to reader response and intertextual theories. For Perri and Ben-Porat, the writer uses allusion to manipulate the reader's response to the text. Under this conception, the text to which a work is alluding (the referent text) exists within that work as a form of interpretive parallelism: a reading of the former is in some way similar to the reading of the latter. Ben-Porat and Perri would argue that the author becomes a participant in the process of creating meaning by using this allusion. This view seems to contradict Riffaterre's belief that meaning is directed by the reader regardless of whether or not it coincides with the author's intentions. This chapter will explore ways in which these seemingly opposing views might be reconciled in order to establish a framework for the remainder of the dissertation. The next chapter will examine the processes for identifying allusion employed by critics as a linguistic phenomenon and discuss the ways in which the structural relationship between the passage that a critic identifies as an allusion (the allusive text) and the referent text affects the presuppositions governing those processes. I will establish a common point from which to explore a wide range of elements by limiting my analysis to a representative range of Shakespeare's works: tragedies (Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, andOthello), comedies (Merchant of Venice and As You Like It), history plays (Richard III andHenry IV, Part One), romances (Cymbeline and The Tempest), the sonnets, and one of the narrative poems (Lucrece). Focussing on this selection fulfils the criteria for this type of study. These works include a number of different genres. They will also allow me to consider variations in how critics determine allusions in prose passages and ones in verse. Moreover, there is a vast quantity of criticisms, written over a long period of time, identifying allusions in these works. I will be able to use this critical material to construct a computer database of alluding texts and referent texts that will allow me not only to compare and contrast the ways in which various critics determine that a passage is an allusion, but also to consider the cultural, sociological and historical factors that influence the allusion-making process. Because of the volume of critical material available on the works being considered, this database cannot be complete. However, it will contain sufficient material to provide a representative sample for study. My analysis in this chapter will combine linguistic description with computational methods to determine the range of relationships that critics in the database make between the wording of the alluding texts and that of the referent texts. Each of the alluding and referent texts will be parsed for syntactic, semantic, and semiotic features. Both Chomsky's Transformational Grammar and Michael Gregory's Communication Linguistics (developed in the Hallidayan systemic tradition) form the theoretical bases for the parses. Transformational Grammar permits a comparison of individual phrases at the level of the D-structure that will facilitate an analysis of allusions oriented towards semantic and syntactic relations. Communication Linguistics allows social and cultural factors (what Gregory refers to as gnostology) to be incorporated into a syntactic and

semantic analysis, and will be useful in determining instances where semantic and semiotic relations play a more important role. The semantic and semiotic parses will also be influenced by the work of Ray Jackendoff, George Lakoff, Geoffrey N. Leech, Claude Lvi-Strauss, and Vladimir Propp. The DiscAn computer program (developed by Pierre Maranda) will process the parsed passages and generate Markovian analyses of their patterns. Finally, I will employ statistical methods to compare the parses of the alluding texts to those of the referent texts. From these comparisons, I will be able to discuss the linguistic paradigms and parameters underlying each critic's process for determining allusion. In the next chapter, I will begin to link the linguistic aspects of allusion with literary theory by exploring how the critics in the database use this device to construct a connection between their reading of the text and the author. Given that the range of statistical correlations between the various allusive and referent texts in the database and the presuppositions governing them will be significant, I will be able to demonstrate how the reader uses allusion as a gauge of critical legitimacy. If the critic can show that his or her interpretation can be directly traced to the author, then that interpretation can lay claim to more credence than one that is completely divorced from the author. Even New Historicist and Cultural Materialist readings of Shakespeare, which deny his influence on the reading of his works, make an implicit connection between the playwright and his text by situating the latter in the former's temporal, political, and cultural location. As a critic's correlation between the linguistic elements of the allusive text and that of the referent text becomes stronger, the "legitimacy" of the reading of which it is a part becomes greater as well. I propose to employ Game Theory as a key element in dealing with the correlation between the linguistic and theoretical elements of allusion. R. Rawdon Wilson believes that intertextuality may be defined as, even grounded upon, a precise concept of play" (211). Taking Wilson's assertion as a starting point, I investigate how his concepttion of "play" and Lyotard's notion of "gaming" can be used to understanding the processes that motivate a critic to construct an allusion. We can view the author and the reader as participants in a game that is weighted on the side of the latter. The reader, accepting the traditional assumptions underlying allusion, "recognizes" a pattern in a text that echoes some aspect of another text. This recognition is independent of any intentions of the author but is constructed as if it were indeed a part of those intentions. The closer the allusive text is to the referent text at various linguistic levels, the greater is the reading's claim to authority. In other words, the reader makes the author a player in the "reading game" and measures the value of its reading by "identifying" the latter's references. I will go on to describe how these constructions can be incorporated into a computational model of allusion by using strategic-form and Bayesian games. The final chapter will propose a general model of allusion and outline the algorithms for an "allusion to "find" allusions in a text stored in electronic form. An important aspect of this chapter will be science and artificial intelligence. In "Computers, Literary Theory, and Theory of Meaning," Gregory G. Columb and Mark Turner note the relation of literary theory to artificial intelligence: All theories of literature either presuppose or explicitly ponder some theory of meaning, and especially, some theory of textual understanding. Such questions have been asked for some time now in the branch of computer science known as artificial intelligence. And computer science's answers, especially those concerning representation of knowledge and natural language

processing, have begun to raise important questions about key theoretical assumptions about meaning and understanding, assumptions that govern literary theory as much as artificial intelligence. (386-87) Both cognitive science and artificial intelligence are relevant to the concept of allusion because they have explored and modelled the processes that influence pattern recognition. By comparing connectionist models of the mind/brain to my model of allusion, I hope to suggest some ways in which linguistic and literary theory can both inform and be informed by these two sciences. And I believe that through such a synthesis of literary theory, linguistics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence, a greater understanding of what it means to read a text can be achieved. Works Cited Colomb, Gregory, and Mark Turner. "Computers, Literary Theory, and the Theory of Meaning." The Future of Literary Theory. Ed. Ralph Cohen. New York: Routledge, 1989. 386410. M[iner], E[arl]. "Allusion." The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Enlarged Edition. Ed. Alan Preminger. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1974. 18. Riffaterre, Michael. "Compulsory Reader Response." In Michael Worton and Judith Still, eds. Intertextuality: Theories and Practices. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1990. 56-78. ---. Text Production. Trans. Terese Lyons. New York: Columbia UP, 1983. Wilson, R. Rawdon. In Palamedes' Shadow: Explorations in Play, Game, and Narrative Theory. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1990.

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