Ph.D. Allusion

7/30/2019 Ph.D. Allusion

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S T E P H E N N A O Y U K I M A T S U B A

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 thePrinceton 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 onvarious 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

ofintertextand intertextuality. These terms have a variety of meanings but I would like to focuson 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 intentionalityto 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

theprocesses 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 ofthe 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 orlinguistic phenomenon but as a synthesis of the two approaches. Mygoal is to develop an outline for a computational linguistic model of allusion that deals with the

concerns of poststructuralist literary theory.
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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, JohnHollander, and Carmela Perri and will explore their relevance to reader response and intertextualtheories. 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 waysimilar 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 seeminglyopposing 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 toexplore 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 andAs You Like It), history plays (Richard IIIandHenry 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 variationsin 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 andreferent 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 criticalmaterial 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 todetermine 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 andcultural factors (what Gregory refers to as gnostology) to be incorporated into a syntactic and


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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, andVladimir Propp. TheDiscAn 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. Fromthese comparisons, I will be able to discuss the linguistic paradigms and parameters underlyingeach critic's process for determining allusion.

In the next chapter, I will begin to link the linguistic aspects of allusion with literary theory byexploring 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 criticallegitimacy. 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 denyhis 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 intertextualitymay 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 theside 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 thoseintentions. 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'sanswers, especially those concerning representation of knowledge and natural language


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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, cognitivescience, 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. 386-410.

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 NarrativeTheory. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1990.

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Copyright 1998-2008 by Stephen Naoyuki Matsuba. All rights reserved
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Ph.D. Allusion