Showing 1 - 3 of 3 Items

Date: 2023-01-01

Creator: Nothando Khumalo

Access: Open access

The present thesis, written in Italian, explores the emotional psyche and narrative order embedded within the ballads of the Decameron, a renowned literary masterpiece by Giovanni Boccaccio. Leveraging the advancements in stylometry and natural language processing techniques, this research aims to convince medieval Italian literature scholars to produce more on scholarship of the ballads and uncover the intricate patterns of human emotions and narrative organization in the ballads. The study begins by establishing a comprehensive corpus of ballads from the Decameron, utilizing digital libraries and text repositories. Subsequently, using stylometric analysis, the research examines the linguistic and stylistic features that distinguish the brigata’s ballads, focusing on elements such as vocabulary, syntax, and rhyme scheme. These analyses enable the identification of authorial patterns, shedding light on the emotional expressions and narrative techniques employed by Boccaccio. A natural language processing model was used to predict authorship of the ballads using each of the brigata’s novelle as training data. The findings of this research contribute to a deeper understanding of the emotional and narrative purpose of the Decameron's ballads. Results of stylometric analysis allowed for new characterization of Panfilo’s ballad as sad and revealed how similarity in the emotional psyches of the brigata transcends gender. These novel perspectives allowed for unique literary analysis of the ballads. Accurate prediction of ballad authorship demonstrates that ballads fit into the narrative structure of the Decameron and restore order in each of the ten days.

Date: 2020-01-01

Creator: Sophie Friedman

Access: Open access

This two-chapter project applies formalist and feminist thinking to the thirty-line description of the Wife of Bath in Geoffrey Chaucer’s medieval, British work The Canterbury Tales. It is an interdisciplinary project; it studies how to read and teach Chaucer at the secondary level based off of these two approaches. In this formalist chapter, I study narrative voice, rhyme, irony, and ekphrasis, writing about the history and function of each of those tools and their role in the passage. I argue that the formalist close reading approach is an excellent teaching tool that generates thorough, rigorous, and joyful reading. In this feminist chapter, I compile a critical literary history of scholarly feminist and pre-feminist engagement with the passage over time. I read into an underlying genotype text, arguing that the Wife of Bath was a female entrepreneur who used textiles as a means of social, professional, and aesthetic expression and empowerment. Then I advocate for a feminist ethical teaching approach—one where we use the text as a non-ethical space in which to explore ethical questions surrounding gender. Ultimately, I argue that feminist and formalist approaches are interdependent and complementary; for both reading and teaching Chaucer, they stand stronger together.

• Embargo End Date: 2027-05-19

Date: 2022-01-01

Creator: Katherine Aiello McKee

Access: Embargoed