Papers by Anne-Sophie Bories
Studia Metrica et Poetica/Studia Metrica et Poetica., Dec 31, 2023
The sixth edition of the Plotting Poetry Conference, entitled "The Plot. Storytelling in Verse", ... more The sixth edition of the Plotting Poetry Conference, entitled "The Plot. Storytelling in Verse", was organised in Budapest, at ELTE University, on June 12 to 14, 2023. It was dedicated to the different features of narrativity in poetry. A wide range of topics was discussed, with a very broad comparative perspective. The talks featured computational analyses for very different literary periods and languages, and promising results were shown during the conference. There were two keynote lectures in the conference. One of them was given by Camille Bloomfield (University Paris Cité) and titled "Personal Storytelling in Instapoetry: A Statistical Approach". Poetry is currently enjoying a renewed interest, particularly from the general public, thanks to social networks such as Instagram, where multimedia poetic productions are flourishing. Generally, a natively digital object, produced by poets who are often digital natives themselves, Instapoetry benefits from being studied with digital analysis tools such as databases and web scraping. Bloomfield's lecture presented an ongoing research project about francophone Instapoetry which takes two directions: on the one hand, the study of these new profiles, the virtual identities and self-storytelling they build through their accounts, and on the other, the new types of poems they produce. Such a corpus raises indeed many questions to researchers in literature and sociology of the literary field, insofar as its content is often ephemeral, mass produced, strongly constrained by the digital interface, and it escapes the traditional boundaries of literary genres.
Histoire de la recherche contemporaine, Dec 1, 2021
De Gruyter eBooks, Dec 5, 2022
Centered on the main question of poetics and poeticity, this volume provides a broad overview of ... more Centered on the main question of poetics and poeticity, this volume provides a broad overview of computational methods including motif analysis, network analysis, machine learning, and natural language processing. Without limiting ourselves to poetry, we explore the poetics of various literary productions in verse or in prose, as well as experiments towards the computational generation of poems. The volume is meant to gather a representative set of such approaches, and to offer a space for sharing perspectives, practices, and inspiring insights into the issues, old and new, being addressed by digital literary studies.
Scholars today are experimenting with a vast array of reading devices in order to explore texts a... more Scholars today are experimenting with a vast array of reading devices in order to explore texts anew, often blending, both on the technical and on the hermeneutical axes, traditional approaches and innovative computing tools, that collect textual features and detect trends not visible to a human eye as they exceed the span of our focus. Our understanding of poetry is not left untouched by the revolution that computational analysis is bringing to the humanities. Because of its intrinsic link to verse, poetry has been a very early object of statistical studies. Any careful examination of metres, rhymes, or caesuras is bound to generate large datasets, calling for the borrowing of methods from the exact sciences. Indeed, attempts at a mathematical evaluation of poetic styles largely predate the use of computers, and the methodological turn towards the use of new technologies has been generally well-received within the academic community. Still, is the mechanically enhanced, “nonhuman” reading of poems fruitful, or even legitimate? Must the literary scholar, whose object is a fundamentally “human” material, meet the burden of proof and possibly cast away intuitions? Conversely, can calculations account for the subtlety of our poetic experience? Is poeticity, in other words, to be found in the measurable sum of artfully assembled processes, or does it escape all normalisation efforts? Stemming from the group Plotting Poetry, a community of scholars of different language areas, working on different time periods and poetical genres, who have come together to share their findings and methods, this volume presents a rich sample of research endeavours in the field. It illustrates how a mechanically-enhanced reading can be put to the test, serve to pursue traditional hermeneutical questions, challenge certain assumptions about forms, reveal unsuspected thematic patterns, feed the approach of the literary historian, or open up new, unthought-of paths for our questionings. It is aimed both at specialists of either poetry or digital humanities, and at a broader readership curious to learn about computational approaches to poetry studies. Anne-Sophie Bories, Introduction Valérie Beaudouin, The Machine in the Garden of Meter and Rhythm Elise Thorsen, David J. Birnbaum, Exploring Inexact Rhyme in Russian Verse Natalie M. Houston, Exploring the Idiom of Victorian Rhyme Through Applied Historical Poetics Peter Verhaar, Opening new patterns from new disorders: A Computational Analysis of the Poetry of Louis MacNeice Éliane Delente, Richard Renault, Projet Anamètre : présentation, limites et avancées Clara Martínez Cantón, Pablo Ruiz Fabo, Elena González-Blanco, Thierry Poibeau, Automatic Enjambment Detection as a New Source of Evidence in Spanish Versification Isabelle Parkinson, A Poetics Defined in the Paratext Muriel Louâpre, Hugues Marchal, Modelling and Visualizing the Evolution of 19th century French Scientific Poetry Christophe Imperiali, Structures du vers di
Modern Languages Open, 2019
Bories: Sex, Wine and Statelessness Art. 14, page 2 of 13 amorous wanderings, and by the collisio... more Bories: Sex, Wine and Statelessness Art. 14, page 2 of 13 amorous wanderings, and by the collision of his Catholic upbringing with his hostility towards limits and limitations, be they national borders or social and sexual norms. Apollinaire is one of the most prominent poets of French modernity. His departure from academic forms, his inclusion of everyday topics, the polyphony of his poetry, bound to the cubist movement, on the subject of which he was a major authority, are mirrored in his versification. Apollinaire's playful free verse is strongly reminiscent of the alexandrine, and this kinship oversteps the border between free and strict verse. The sheer diversity of his poetry, which was the focus of criticism in 1913 (Duhamel 1913), is a founding stone of his poetics. Apollinaire does not attack old forms so much as he attacks the separation of forms, of subjects, of tones. This is illustrated by the first line of Alcools, 'À la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien' ('Zone'): the desire for novelty stems from a weariness, not a dislike, of old forms. This ambivalence is expressed in the choice for this very line of an alexandrine, the most characteristically traditional metre, giving way to unexpected free verse from the second line. Alcools (1913) is a deeply European collection, with almost every poem referring to Apollinaire's intertwined travels and love stories throughout Europe. The last one is the 174line 'Vendémiaire' (149), the title of which sets wine as the primary theme. The poem features an overheard ' chanson de Paris' (16), in which a personified Paris expresses its thirst for wine and for European towns, to which in turn a number of rivers and towns reply, offering themselves to the ever-thirstier capital in an orgy-like feast, until eventually, the devouring capital drinks up the entire universe. This exhilarated glorification of Apollinaire's adoptive city mixes sexual double meanings with religious references, in an effort to found a halfparodic new religion (Burgos, Debon and Décaudin, 104-8). Instead of Apollinaire's own painful statelessness, the ' chanson de Paris' portrays a liberated pan-Europeanism, ultimately opening onto the 'universelle ivrognerie' (171) in which a godlike poet creates the world anew from primordial wine. This is an exceptionally rich poem, overcrowded even, with multiple and overlapping meanings, tones and verse forms making it difficult for the reader to follow (Read 73). Such depth and complexity exemplifies several of the creative liberties taken by Apollinaire (Alexandre 1994; Campa 1996; Décaudin 1960, 1967), with versification playing an important role in the construction and circulation of meaning (Bobillot).
Peut-on saisir la patte d’un auteur, la prendre dans ses mains et voir comme elle est faite ? C’e... more Peut-on saisir la patte d’un auteur, la prendre dans ses mains et voir comme elle est faite ? C’est une gageure, surtout s’agissant d’un poete aussi eclectique que Raymond Queneau, dont les poemes graves et comiques a la fois charment le lecteur et le deroutent par leur diversite de tons, de formes et de sujets, des « petits pigeons pleins de fientaisie » au « cafard mortuaire qui grignote les morts ». Pour dechiffrer le style en apparence eparpille du fondateur de l’Oulipo, l’auteure consacre une vaste base de donnees a l’analyse precise de tous ses vers, soit 404 741 informations sur 15 996 vers. Cette approche quantitative, et la vision de loin des phenomenes metriques, est etroitement associee a une minutieuse lecture de pres, pour produire une comprehension multifocale des poemes. L’etude de la versification sert alors de point d’appui a l’interpretation d’une œuvre poetique majeure, dont le cote rigolo masque et revele a la fois une sincerite implacablement lucide.
Littérature, 2017
Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Armand Colin. © Armand Colin. Tous droits réservés pour... more Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Armand Colin. © Armand Colin. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit.
Studia Metrica et Poetica, Mar 10, 2020
The Nancy meeting, which follows earlier ones in Basel (2017) and Berlin (2018), was organized by... more The Nancy meeting, which follows earlier ones in Basel (2017) and Berlin (2018), was organized by Anne-Sophie Bories (University of Basel) and Véronique Montémont (Université de Lorraine) and included twenty presentations in English and in French. The program and other materials from all three meetings to date are available on the Plotting Poetry website at https://plottingpoetry.wordpress.com/. The first presentation of the conference, Ophir Münz-Manor's "Hebrew liturgical poetry from late antiquity: preliminary computational explorations", reported on the author's experience of revisiting with digital tools (the CATMA toolkit, which formed the focus of Jan-Christoph Meister's keynote address the following day) the quantitative research he had undertaken manually some fifteen years earlier in the context of his PhD dissertation. Münz-Manor's object of study was a corpus of some 220 texts (about 50,000 words) of Hebrew liturgical poetry (piyyut), and his focus was on the use of figurative language (especially metaphor, but also simile, synecdoche, personification, and metonymy) in those texts, which turned out to be surprisingly marginal (only slightly more than half as dense as in Psalms). Reanalyzing his original dissertation data with CATMA yielded some results that mirrored those obtained with manual methods, others that refuted earlier conclusions, and still others that were new and that would not have been available without the use of computational tools and methods.
Although Raymond Queneau employs a variety of canonical metres in his poetry, he appears to avoid... more Although Raymond Queneau employs a variety of canonical metres in his poetry, he appears to avoid the decasyllable almost completely. On the rare occasions when he does use it, he systematically opts for a 5-5 metre instead of the canonical 4-6, thus forgetting both the decasyllable itself and its tradi- tional metre. The 5-5 metre bears neither the epic nor the lyric registers of the 4-6, being linked more to folk song, with connotations of a lower register. In this article I make use of an extensive database developed specifically to analyse Raymond Queneau's versification, in order to assess the form and the meaning of Queneau's decasyllable. I link the use of this metre to the themes of memory and the past. Queneau, whilst forgetting a canonical metre - the 4-6 -, remembers a rare one - the 5-5 - and uses this vulgar verse to address a serious, metaphysical reflection on the passing of time. This mismatching of subject and tone is typical of Queneau's writing practices.
Nous proposons une approche statistique de la versification de Raymond Queneau. Au cœur de notre ... more Nous proposons une approche statistique de la versification de Raymond Queneau. Au cœur de notre travail se trouve une base de donnees MySQL, qui rassemble des informations descriptives a propos de la versification des 15.996 vers publies par Queneau de son vivant. Jusqu’ici, les bases de donnees consacrees a la metrique ont explore les vers reguliers, laissant de cote le vers libre et les questions specifiques qu’il pose. Notre base envisage conjointement ces deux categories de vers. Nous en tirons des statistiques, des representations graphiques, et une approche globale du texte.La versification de Raymond Queneau a ete peu etudiee. Il s’agit d’un corpus heterogene, pour lequel la distinction entre vers libres et vers reguliers n’est pas toujours operante. Au sein de ces formes variees, nous avons cherche des traits fixes, des motifs recurrents, des tendances, des routines. Nous proposons une typologie des vers queniens, decrivons la parente du vers libre quenien avec le vers classique, modelisons des structures de la poesie de Queneau et etudions les significations liees a ses choix metriques.Il ressort de nos resultats que la versification de Queneau est porteuse de signification. Queneau y manifeste son refus des conventions, et son choix systematique d’une troisieme voie reconciliant conservatisme et innovation.Ce travail ouvre des perspectives pour les bases de donnees consacrees a la versification. De nouvelles bases de donnees sont a developper, pour d’autres corpus, qui enrichiront les champs de la stylistique et de la poetique.
De Gruyter eBooks, Dec 5, 2022
The progressive digitization of texts, be they literary or not, has had a remarkable impact on th... more The progressive digitization of texts, be they literary or not, has had a remarkable impact on the way we access them, making it possible to obtain help from computers towards the analysis of literary works. Treating text as data allows researchers to test existing hypotheses and, sometimes, ask new questions. And yet, what might appear like a scholarly revolution is actually the natural continuation of former efforts. From card files to spreadsheets to deep learning, quantitative approaches are not a disruption of scholarly practices, particularly in the exploration of poetic texts, which typically rely on a highly regulated, and thus readily measurable, material. Whatever the complexity of the method used, viewing texts through this concentrating lens, this restricted gaze, forms a camera obscura within which lines of regularity may appear that we hadn't necessarily thought of beforehand, enriching and furthering the scholarly examination of literary productions.
De Gruyter eBooks, Dec 5, 2022
Centered on the main question of poetics and poeticity, this volume provides a broad overview of ... more Centered on the main question of poetics and poeticity, this volume provides a broad overview of computational methods including motif analysis, network analysis, machine learning, and natural language processing. Without limiting ourselves to poetry, we explore the poetics of various literary productions in verse or in prose, as well as experiments towards the computational generation of poems. The volume is meant to gather a representative set of such approaches, and to offer a space for sharing perspectives, practices, and inspiring insights into the issues, old and new, being addressed by digital literary studies.
De Gruyter eBooks, Dec 19, 2022
The progressive digitization of texts, be they literary or not, has had a remarkable impact on th... more The progressive digitization of texts, be they literary or not, has had a remarkable impact on the way we access them, making it possible to obtain help from computers towards the analysis of literary works. Treating text as data allows researchers to test existing hypotheses and, sometimes, ask new questions. And yet, what might appear like a scholarly revolution is actually the natural continuation of former efforts. From card files to spreadsheets to deep learning, quantitative approaches are not a disruption of scholarly practices, particularly in the exploration of poetic texts, which typically rely on a highly regulated, and thus readily measurable, material. Whatever the complexity of the method used, viewing texts through this concentrating lens, this restricted gaze, forms a camera obscura within which lines of regularity may appear that we hadn't necessarily thought of beforehand, enriching and furthering the scholarly examination of literary productions.
De Gruyter eBooks, Nov 23, 2022
The open access publication of this book has been published with the support of the Swiss Nationa... more The open access publication of this book has been published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Although Raymond Queneau employs a variety of canonical metres in his poetry, he appears to avoid... more Although Raymond Queneau employs a variety of canonical metres in his poetry, he appears to avoid the decasyllable almost completely. On the rare occasions when he does use it, he systematically opts for a 5-5 metre instead of the canonical 4-6, thus forgetting both the decasyllable itself and its tradi- tional metre. The 5-5 metre bears neither the epic nor the lyric registers of the 4-6, being linked more to folk song, with connotations of a lower register. In this article I make use of an extensive database developed specifically to analyse Raymond Queneau's versification, in order to assess the form and the meaning of Queneau's decasyllable. I link the use of this metre to the themes of memory and the past. Queneau, whilst forgetting a canonical metre - the 4-6 -, remembers a rare one - the 5-5 - and uses this vulgar verse to address a serious, metaphysical reflection on the passing of time. This mismatching of subject and tone is typical of Queneau's writing practices
Nous proposons une approche statistique de la versification de Raymond Queneau. Au cœur de notre ... more Nous proposons une approche statistique de la versification de Raymond Queneau. Au cœur de notre travail se trouve une base de données MySQL, qui rassemble des informations descriptives à propos de la versification des 15.996 vers publiés par Queneau de son vivant. Jusqu’ici, les bases de données consacrées à la métrique ont exploré les vers réguliers, laissant de côté le vers libre et les questions spécifiques qu’il pose. Notre base envisage conjointement ces deux catégories de vers. Nous en tirons des statistiques, des représentations graphiques, et une approche globale du texte.La versification de Raymond Queneau a été peu étudiée. Il s’agit d’un corpus hétérogène, pour lequel la distinction entre vers libres et vers réguliers n’est pas toujours opérante. Au sein de ces formes variées, nous avons cherché des traits fixes, des motifs récurrents, des tendances, des routines. Nous proposons une typologie des vers queniens, décrivons la parenté du vers libre quenien avec le vers clas...
Un nouveau projet de recherche, fort philologeeky! Je suis très reconnaissante au Fonds National ... more Un nouveau projet de recherche, fort philologeeky! Je suis très reconnaissante au Fonds National Suisse, qui a bien voulu m’accorder une prestigieuse bourse Marie Heim-Vögtlin pour deux ans de recherche postdoctorale sur ce sujet. Je suis intégrée à l'excellente équipe de l'Université de Bâle. Résumé: D’emblée, le vers libre semble une contradiction dans les termes. Caractéristique de la poésie moderne, la forme serait vers, entité métrique réglée, et libre, échappant aux règles de la versifi..
Nous proposons une approche statistique de la versification de Raymond Queneau. Au cœur de notre ... more Nous proposons une approche statistique de la versification de Raymond Queneau. Au cœur de notre travail se trouve une base de données MySQL, qui rassemble des informations descriptives à propos de la versification des 15.996 vers publiés par Queneau de son vivant. Jusqu’ici, les bases de données consacrées à la métrique ont exploré les vers réguliers, laissant de côté le vers libre et les questions spécifiques qu’il pose. Notre base envisage conjointement ces deux catégories de vers. Nous en tirons des statistiques, des représentations graphiques, et une approche globale du texte.La versification de Raymond Queneau a été peu étudiée. Il s’agit d’un corpus hétérogène, pour lequel la distinction entre vers libres et vers réguliers n’est pas toujours opérante. Au sein de ces formes variées, nous avons cherché des traits fixes, des motifs récurrents, des tendances, des routines. Nous proposons une typologie des vers queniens, décrivons la parenté du vers libre quenien avec le vers clas...
In Tackling the Toolkit, we focus on the methodological innovations, challenges, obstacles and ev... more In Tackling the Toolkit, we focus on the methodological innovations, challenges, obstacles and even shortcomings associated with applying quantitative methods to poetry specifically and poetics more broadly. Using tools including natural language processing, web ontologies, similarity detection devices and machine learning, our contributors explore not only metres, stanzas, stresses and rhythms but also genres, subgenres, lexical material and cognitive processes. Whether they are testing old theories and laws, making complex concepts machine-readable or developing new lines of textual analysis, their works challenge standard descriptions of norms and variations.
Sur un ton qui mele l'angoisse et la facetie, Raymond Queneau met en scene dans son œuvre poe... more Sur un ton qui mele l'angoisse et la facetie, Raymond Queneau met en scene dans son œuvre poetique une sinistre trinite Mere-Soleil-Excrement, et ce theme funeste s'accompagne de l'emploi massif et inhabituel d'octosyllabes. L'association d'une base de donnees sur les vers du poete et de micro-lectures permet d'eclairer les liens d'un metre et d'un motif thematique, pour devoiler un Queneau intime chez qui ironie et sincerite sont indissociables, et dont l'accession a la puissance creatrice est en lien etroit avec ce rire desarmant et desespere. English A Messy Maternal Metre in Raymond Queneau's Works Mixing anxiety with facetiae, Raymond Queneau's poetry stages a sinister Mother-Sun-Excrement trinity, and this theme comes with an extensive and unusual use of octosyllabic verses. The combination of a database on the poet's verse and micro-readings sheds light on the connection between a metre and a thematic pattern to shed light o...
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Papers by Anne-Sophie Bories