In exploring the idea of lyric performances as 'textual events', this volume marks a departure from interpretations of Greek lyric as socio-political discourse. Building on the renewed concern with the aesthetic, it studies poetic effects that cannot be captured in terms of function alone and re-examines the relationship between form and context.

Recent decades have seen a major expansion in our understanding of how early Greek lyric functioned in its social, political, and ritual contexts, and the fundamental role song played in the day-to-day lives of communities, groups, and individuals has been the object of intense study. This volume places its focus elsewhere, and attempts to illuminate poetic effects that cannot be captured in functional terms alone. Employing a range of interpretative methods, it explores the idea of lyric performances as 'textual events'. Some chapters investigate the pragmatic relationship between real performance contexts and imaginative settings, while others consider how lyric poems position themselves in relation to earlier texts and textual traditions, or discuss the distinctive encounters lyric poems create between listeners, authors, and performers. Individual lyric texts and authors, such as Sappho, Alcaeus, and Pindar, are analysed in detail, alongside treatments of the relationship between lyric and the Homeric Hymns. Building on the renewed concern with the aesthetic in the study of Greek lyric and beyond, Textual Events aims to re-examine the relationship between the poems' formal features and their historical contexts. Lyric poems are a type of socio-political discourse, but they are also objects of attention in themselves. They enable reflection on social and ritual practices as much as they are embedded within them. As well as expressing cultural norms, lyric challenges listeners to think about and experience the world afresh.

Engaging with a range of events-historical moments, theatrical performances, public presentations, and courtly intrigues - and the texts that record them, this book explores representational practice as a component of Elizabethan political culture. Considering the inscriptive production of mediated, indirect experience as an authorial challenge to the value of the immediate, direct experience of events, and conversely, recognizing the multi-valent impact of theatrical performance and performativity as a reinvigoration of the immediate, this study traces the emergence of 'realness' as a textual effect and a mode of political intervention. This interactive, refractive nexus of experience and inscription comprises what Sandra Logan calls the 'text/event'. The four primary foci of this investigation - the 1558 coronation entry; the 1575 entertainments at Kenilworth; the 1590s dramatizations of the reign of Richard II; and the Essex trial of 1601 - serve as exempla of four moments in the reign of Elizabeth I which suggest an increasingly complex interaction between events and texts developing in the last half of the sixteenth century. Logan argues that, in representing England's recent and distant past, a wide range of social subjects engaged in a struggle for intellectual credibility and social viability, and in the process generated a contingent public sphere within which history, framed as a coherent narrative shaped by causal relationships, was brought to bear on the concerns of the Elizabethan present and future. Assessing how these chronicles, short prose histories, and historical dramas each made use of the materials and techniques of the others, blurring the distinctions between historiography and poetry, as well as between past and present, Logan considers the conjunctions between the development of new genres and perceptions about inscription and experience, and changing socioeconomic institutions and practices.

A witty exploration of the transmission of cultural texts

What is an event? From a philosophical perspective, events are irregular occurrences—moments of change and interruption—categorized by human perception, language, and thought. While philosophers have pored over the subject of events extensively in recent years, The Event: Literature and Theory seeks to ground it: What is literature’s approach to the event? How does literature produce and give testimony to events? Ilai Rowner’s study not only revisits some of the most important thinkers of our time, including Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Martin Heidegger, it also develops a critical approach to literature that questions the meaning of the literary event through examinations of literary works by Marcel Proust, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and T. S. Eliot. Rowner offers a new method of thinking about the particular characteristics of the event within literary works and defines the creative value of literature as the aspiration toward the un-happening within the happening. In this study the experience of literature—as an act of both writing and reading—becomes the struggle to capture the excessive movement of the event while also revealing the creative energy within that work of literature.

The majority of information on the Internet is expressed in written text. Understanding and extracting this information is crucial to building intelligent systems that can organize this knowledge, but most algorithms focus on learning atomic facts and relations. For instance, we can reliably extract facts like "Stanford is a University" and "Professors teach Science" by observing redundant word patterns across a corpus. However, these facts do not capture richer knowledge like the way detonating a bomb is related to destroying a building, or that the perpetrator who was convicted must have been arrested. A structured model of these events and entities is needed to understand language across many genres, including news, blogs, and even social media. This dissertation describes a new approach to knowledge acquisition and extraction that learns rich structures of events (e.g., plant, detonate, destroy) and participants (e.g., suspect, target, victim) over a large corpus of news articles, beginning from scratch and without human involvement. As opposed to early event models in Natural Language Processing (NLP) such as scripts and frames, modern statistical approaches and advances in NLP now enable new representations and large-scale learning over many domains. This dissertation begins by describing a new model of events and entities called Narrative Event Schemas. A Narrative Event Schema is a collection of events that occur together in the real world, linked by the typical entities involved. I describe the representation itself, followed by a statistical learning algorithm that observes chains of entities repeatedly connecting the same sets of events within documents. The learning process extracts thousands of verbs within schemas from 14 years of newspaper data. I present novel contributions in the field of temporal ordering to build classifiers that order the events and infer likely schema orderings. I then present several new evaluations for the extracted knowledge. Finally, I apply Narrative Event Schemas to the field of Information Extraction, learning templates of events with sets of semantic roles. Most Information Extraction approaches assume foreknowledge of the domain's templates, but I instead start from scratch and learn schemas as templates, and then extract the entities from text as in a standard extraction task. My algorithm is the first to learn templates without human guidance, and its results approach those of supervised algorithms.

The book offers a detailed guide to temporal ordering, exploring open problems in the field and providing solutions and extensive analysis. It addresses the challenge of automatically ordering events and times in text. Aided by TimeML, it also describes and presents concepts relating to time in easy-to-compute terms. Working out the order that events and times happen has proven difficult for computers, since the language used to discuss time can be vague and complex. Mapping out these concepts for a computational system, which does not have its own inherent idea of time, is, unsurprisingly, tough. Solving this problem enables powerful systems that can plan, reason about events, and construct stories of their own accord, as well as understand the complex narratives that humans express and comprehend so naturally. This book presents a theory and data-driven analysis of temporal ordering, leading to the identification of exactly what is difficult about the task. It then proposes and evaluates machine-learning solutions for the major difficulties. It is a valuable resource for those working in machine learning for natural language processing as well as anyone studying time in language, or involved in annotating the structure of time in documents.