Neither Telling nor Describing. Reflective Passages and Perceived Reflectiveness 1700-1945

Abstract

The paper analyses within-fiction reflections in 250 years of literary history. To this end, we formalised the concept of “reflective passage”, demonstrate how our annotation categories are deduced from literary theory and derive three subphenomena – comment, generalisation, and non-fictional speech – that constitute literary reflection. A collaborative annotation serves (a) as basis for the training of a neural classifier and (b) as dataset for a reception experiment leading to the calculation of a ”reflection score”, a measurement for the perceived reflectiveness of a textual passage. The classifier is applied to a diachronic corpus of German-language literary fictions derived from the KOLIMO corpus through extensive metadata enrichment and filtering. The results suggest three boom periods of reflective passages: around 1755, 1835 and 1920 and show effects of text length, canonisation status and authors’ sex.