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The power of Words
"Literature, in its widest sense, embraces
all compositions in writing or print which preserve
the results of observation, thought, or fancy ..." says
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary in its definition "... It is often confined, however,
to belles-lettres, or works of taste and sentiment, as
poetry, eloquence, history, etc., excluding abstract
discussions and mere erudition. "
Literature can be defined by listing criteria which literary works
have fully or partially to satisfy. Criteria defining the syntacical
and semantical structure. But there is an empirical
approach as well, managed unconsciously by most readers: they build up a
reference system of literary works. Authors or better their writings
function as thresholds by which others get classified into literature
und non-literature.
Each reader - though highly influenced by his educational upbringing
and other factors - develops his or her own reference system and
as a consequence there can never be a total agreement on the
borderline between "good" und "bad" literature.
There are irrevocable monuments in literature which can't be
criticized without being treated as illiterate. Shakespeare and James
Joyce, just to name two, are beyond all doubt.
If you are looking for literature on the web, Project Gutenberg is a
great place to start with. It is the Internet's oldest producer of
free electronic books (eBooks or etexts).
If you want to look for newer literature, which hasn't made its
way into the "reference system", you can have a look at Autoren heute and at my novel Galois Schweigen.
A biographie in German can be downloaded:
Evariste Galois oder das tragische Scheitern
eines Genies
Please see my other site at Bernd Klein Net
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If you are a computer linguist or another person who is not only interested
in the power and beauty of words but also in their mathematical and statistical
structure, you need a powerful programming language. Python should be your choice.
Please consider joining one of my
Python Text Processing
Courses, if you want to learn it. They are covering both an introduction in the language
and in text classification and processing.
© Copyright 1996 - 2018, Bernd Klein
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My German site
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