AIS: Shakespeare by the Numbers.

Catalog description

Using Shakespeare’s plays and poems as a test case, this course will explore the ways in which statistical methods common in mathematics can be applied to the interpretation of literary texts and to debates over composition and authorship. Students will begin by learning traditional stylistics—metrical, rhetorical and lexical analysis, including the use of concordances—and getting a basic grounding in the literary culture of the late 16th century. They will then explore computational stylistics and data visualizations using tools like Voyant and Palladio as we consider the contrast between what literary scholars now call “close” and “distant” reading. Students’ final papers will combine literary critical and quantitative methods to make an original argument about some aspect of Shakespeare’s works. The course will also give us occasion to reflect on the way two apparently different disciplines—mathematics and literary criticism—both tend towards God as they seek the divine order that lies behind phenomenal reality.