"Literary Language and Complex Literature"

1998 M.A. Thesis

Links to the full text of the introduction, individual chapters, and bibliography of the 1998 M.A. Thesis "Literary Language and Complex Literature," completed by James Luberda at Northwest Missouri State University, appear below. Since the original posting, these have been updated to be fully suited to the web, and are available in versions with and without index frames for the two key chapters.

This thesis represents my initial efforts to resolve a useful definition of literary language and a better understanding of what it means for a reader to encounter a complex text. Although I did not take an explicitly cognitive science-informed approach, I did take advantage of Sperber & Wilson's Relevance: Communication & Cognition, as well as an information-theoretic approach to language. In (informed) retrospect I find that the majority of the claims made in this thesis would merely have been better substantiated by empirical research of the sort produced by that interdiscipline (see, for example, the article "Polysemy in Conceptual Combination: Testing the Constraint Theory of Combination" by Costello and Keane in Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (1997). Future work will usefully merge the fruits of both.

Note that chapters 1 and 2 contain the bulk of the theoretical material; chapter 3 is a reading of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 in the context established by the earlier chapters.