via http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/graphs_trees_materialism_fishing/ "someone with good taste in books (i.e., it often agrees with mine) and generally sensible ideas" "It also shows up in his penchant for quantifying, one of the more piquant instances of which is a footnote in The Modern Epic which shows that the distance of countries from Ireland is positively correlated with the frequency with which references to them in Ulysses are cliches. (I can't remember whether Moretti thinks this is a reflection on Bloom or on Joyce.) ""Moretti wants to find the frequencies with which different kinds of book occur in large libraries, by means of small samples. This is a perfectly legitimate procedure, but it is of course very unlikely that the frequencies found in a sample of, say, 100 books are exactly the same as the frequencies in the entire population of, say, 1,000 books. To make comparisons between different populations, we need to know how precise the estimates are: the difference between 60% and 50% doesn't signify if the uncertainty in each case is plus or minus 10%. What Moretti did was "sampling without replacement," and calculating the confidence intervals for this procedure is an old chestnut of statistical inference. (For fixed sample size, unsurprisingly, the confidence intervals are tighter for small populations than for large ones. Conversely, and again unsurprisingly, for fixed populations, smaller samples have larger confidence intervals.) It'd be unreasonable to expect Moretti, a middle-aged full professor, to learn statistical inference, no matter how much he writes in praise of "serial history." Whether it is equally unreasonable to expect him to send a graduate student down to the college bookstore with a twenty for Schaum's Outline of Statistics and a roborative latte, look up "Proportions, confidence intervals for" in the index, turn to p. 196, and start plugging and chugging, is another matter."

Make no mistake, that’s what Disney was dealing with in that carnival of animal dancers, appearance and reality. That’s one of the major themes in cartoons. It is central, for example, in that most austere of cartoon premises, the Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons of Chuck Jones. To deny it of Disney in the film he planned as a showcase for this new medium, a film in which, among other things, he showed the origins of life on earth and the death of the dinosaurs, to deny a central interest in the play of appearance and reality is to be deeply and perhaps willfully mistaken about the nature of the medium in which Disney so deliberately and brilliantly worked.

"It takes, say, thousands of person hours spread over a handful of scholars to create and ‘debug’ a single conceptual trope. When that’s done the trope can show up in casebooks and undergraduate texts. And from there, it goes into the knowledge-hungry minds of our students. And when one of them writes reviews for The New York Times, BINGO! a conceptual trope enters the self-styled paper of record. And, from there, the world."

"That’s how culture works."

"Wickus escaped and I remained in my seat, but I will never forget how powerful that emotion was, how I sat there gulping air for the next ten minutes as I tried to regain some kind of equilibrium. This film had put me through something brutal, something I hadn’t been prepared for.

This film was absolutely right to do that.

The direct allegory running through the story is easy to recognize: District 9 is a reference to District 6, an area in South Africa where 60,000 colored Africans were evicted from their homes in during apartheid in the 1970s. The atrocious behavior of MNU’s employees and their thirst for better firepower is a commentary on the private military contractors being used by governments today, specifically Xe Services (formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide). Choosing to zero in on these two topics seems logical: the film was set and shot in South Africa and the potential problems associated with military contractors are a modern concern."

"… Edmundson, similar to some conservative or traditionalist humanists, believes in a command model. The public only valued literature because the critics told them to. The public only understood literature because the critics told them what it meant. The public only read literature because the critics lead them through the reading of it. Once the commandment vanished, so did the Western tradition itself, and with extraordinary rapidity."

Now there’s no reason to think Wallace loathed writing nonfiction—it just wasn’t his passion. He aligned himself with Dostoevsky and Pynchon, not Capote and Talese, and there’s even scuttlebutt out there that he killed himself in despair over his unshapely mess of a last book and the pressure of never living up to, well, himself. I will read that last book when it comes out, for sure, and since last September I’ve decoded a fair number of his hermetic short stories and even committed a month to finishing (and I did finish!) all 1,079 pages of Infinite Jest, down to every last little cross-eyed footnote’s footnote. I felt less guilty after finishing, but yet finishing only reinforced what I’d suspected. When the Library of America editors get around to selecting a picture of the long-haired, bandana-ed, tobacco-cheeked Wallace for its 2050 catalogues, they’re not going to spotlight his fiction in this first volume. It’ll be the nonfiction he composed during spare hours.

El Centro Virtual Cervantes ofrece materiales y servicios para los profesores de español, los estudiantes, los traductores, los periodistas y otros profesionales que trabajan con la lengua, así como para los hispanistas de todo el mundo, y para cualquier persona interesada en la lengua española, su cultura y la situación del español en la Red. El sitio está organizado en cuatro grandes secciones: Enseñanza, Literatura, Lengua y Artes

"for Juno, the clinic embodies what she is afraid people will see when they look at her--the set of implications and connotations evoked by the catchphrase "sexually active." Which, based on the way she reacts to the term, seems to her to indicate both sexual promiscuity and the kind of blase attitude about sex and its potential consequences that she chides her best friend for expressing when she first tells her the news. Although Juno often performs that kind of flippancy about her own pregnancy, just as she spends a lot of time denying that sex with Bleeker meant anything to her emotionally, it's fairly clear early on that this doesn't actually reflect her emotions. In other words, what the clinic represents to Juno is lack of commitment--a refusal to take her, her sexuality, and her pregnancy seriously. And for someone with Juno's adolescent intensity--for a kid with her personality at her age, everything that happens to her matters greatly, and every major decision has to be consi

Abstract; Fanfiction has been hailed as 'the democratic genre' (Pugh 2000), its proponents celebrated as 'textual poachers' (Jenkins 1994) who radically disrupt but also reinvigorate canonical texts. Over time, aspects of plotting and characterisation int