5.0111 Rs: Immolation; Lib. of America; Sentence Leng (4/102)

Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Fri, 31 May 91 15:21:26 EDT

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 5, No. 0111. Friday, 31 May 1991.


(1) Date: Thu, 30 May 1991 09:53 MST (50 lines)
From: OCRAMER%CCNODE@VAXF.Colorado.EDU
Subject: Re: 5.0104 Qs: ...Self-Immolation

(2) Date: Wed, 29 May 91 22:51 EDT (16 lines)
From: CALLEGRE@umtlvr.bitnet
Subject: Re: 5.0098 Library of America

(3) Date: 30 May 91 11:51:18 bst (25 lines)
From: D.Mealand@edinburgh.ac.uk
Subject: Sentence length

(4) Date: Fri, 31 May 1991 11:40:12 EDT (11 lines)
From: hmcook@boe00.minc.umd.edu (Hardy M. Cook)
Subject: RE: Library of America

(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 30 May 1991 09:53 MST
From: OCRAMER%CCNODE@VAXF.Colorado.EDU
Subject: Re: 5.0104 Qs: ...Self-Immolation

From: Owen Cramer <OCRAMER%CCNODE@VAXF.COLORADO.EDU>
Re : Self-immolation

Right, it's a rather off-putting topic. Still, for people whose
religious convictions are secure, immolation=sacrifice, and particularly
*self*-immola- tion might often enough be a valid statement. Ancient
types of self-sacrifice that occur to me as a classicist are these:

1. Voluntary self-effacement by mutilation etc. to guarantee ~bona
fides~ of a statement which is then made verbally by the self-victimized
person. Odysseus in Odyssey 4.244 "mastering himself with unseemly
blows" to let him talk to the Trojans, compare Zopyrus mutilating
himself(Herodotus 3.154ff) to get to the Babylonians for Darius's
benefit.

2. Self-chosen death to mark the end of useful life, usually also to
make a further implication about others who remain alive. Prexaspes in
Herodotus 3.75, the assassin of the true Smerdis, called on to speak for
the false Smerdis and his Magian supporters, ascending a tall tower,
telling the truth and jumping to his death. Dido at the end of Aeneid 4
ascending the funeral pyre ostensibly made for the relics of her
faithless lover Aeneas.

3. Explicit religious ~devotio~, self-sacrifice to guarantee divine
favor on a battle, say; most famously the father and son P. Decimus Mus
who immolated themselves in two separate battles during the middle Roman
Republic because omens indicated the death of the consul would guarantee
victory. I don't know what the cats of Egypt meant (Herodotus 2.66) by
immolating themselves in fires.

4. This all inevitably leads to the executions, by the two states people
tend to value out of the political history of the ancient world, Athens
and Rome, of the willing victims, each with divine guidance, Socrates
and Jesus.

5. And, in modern times the whole pattern has been put together by,
notably, Hoelderlin in a series of poems and the tragedy-fragments of
"Empedocles" (there's a case of biographical tradition taking off:
Diogenes Laertius collects the stories of his death including the famous
leap into the crater of Mt. Aetna (8.67ff)), and offered, via the
Stefan George group, to the German World War I generation as a model,
analogous to the British Gospel-and- Pilgrim's-Progress model noted by
Paul Fussel (~The Great War and Modern Memory~), for modern military
self-sacrifice.

That's enough Memorial Day meditation for now.
(2) --------------------------------------------------------------19----
Date: Wed, 29 May 91 22:51 EDT
From: CALLEGRE@umtlvr.bitnet
Subject: Re: 5.0098 Library of America

I thank Joseph Jones, L. Dale Patterson and John Lavagnino for their
wxplanations about the *Library of America*. I am glad to see that the
Pleiade comparison was apt, but in the past ten to fifteen years, the
volumes in the pleiade collection have become very close to critical
editions, so that they are not only authoritative, but also definitive,
inasmuch of course as the edition of works by authors passed away can be
definitive... Anyway thanks again. Being a specialist of french 20th
century literature does not mean that I read only that. I will buy the
Hawthornes next.

Christian Allegre
Callegre@UMTLVR.bitnet
(3) --------------------------------------------------------------37----
Date: 30 May 91 11:51:18 bst
From: D.Mealand@edinburgh.ac.uk
Subject: Sentence length

Back in March Jean Veronis asked about the non-normal distribution
pattern of sentence length data. The only useful comment I have
seen on this so far is in Kenny A., _The Computation of Style_
Pergamon 1982 p.147 who argues that while the sentence length
DATA are not normally distributed the SAMPLING distribution
is normal. He cites the central limit theorem in this regard.
The point is that the means of the repeated samples will be
normally distributed around the population mean' he says.

Anyone have any further useful comments on this ?
Does anyone have a note of recent literary work using the
stats of sentence length distributions please ? Kenny has
a brief discussion in his Stylometric Study of the NT. I can't
remember if K.J.Neumann looks at them in his 1990 Authenticity
of the Pauline Epistles which uses MVA on several criteria.

****************************************************************************
David Mealand * Bitnet: D.Mealand%uk.ac.edinburgh@ukacrl
University of Edinburgh * Office Fax: (+44)-31-220-0952
Scotland,U.K. EH1 2LX * Office tel.:(+44)-31-225-8400 ext.221/217
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(4) --------------------------------------------------------------27----
Date: Fri, 31 May 1991 11:40:12 EDT
From: hmcook@boe00.minc.umd.edu (Hardy M. Cook)
Subject: RE: Library of America

It may be of interest to some of you that many of the Library
of America editions are available on disk and CDROM from the
Electronic Text Corporation for use with their WordCruncher
program.

Hardy M. Cook
HMCook@BOE00.MINC.UMD.EDU