Books

Two sustained inquiries

Name: The Shapes of Stories: Sentiment Analysis for Narrative
Author: Katherine Elkins
ISBN: 9781009270397

How narrative gives form to consciousness, memory, emotion, and interpretation, from Proust’s philosophy of experience to a rigorous computational method for tracing stories across texts.

Oxford University Press · 2022

Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives

Edited by Katherine Elkins, who also wrote the introduction and contributed the chapter “Proust’s Consciousness.”

The volume brings Proust into philosophy as a thinker of consciousness, perception, time, selfhood, ethics, and aesthetic experience. It gathers philosophers and literary scholars to treat In Search of Lost Time as a sustained investigation into how experience becomes knowledge.

In “Proust’s Consciousness,” Elkins argues that involuntary memory is only one part of Proust’s philosophical project, foregrounding perception, present-tense experience, and consciousness.

Oxford University Press

Cambridge University Press · 2022

The Shapes of Stories: Sentiment Analysis for Narrative

A Cambridge Element in Digital Literary Studies by Katherine Elkins.

The Shapes of Stories develops the first rigorous methodology for narrative sentiment analysis. It establishes a reproducible framework for selecting, comparing, validating, and interpreting sentiment models across full-length narrative texts while retaining the interpretive questions central to literary study.

Building on instruments developed by Elkins and Jon Chun, the method tests robustness across sentiment systems and shows how model selection, smoothing, scale, and segmentation shape the story curve a researcher sees.

Its account of narrative as emotional and cognitive form continues in current work on persuasion, memory, interpretation, human judgment, and model behavior.

Cambridge

A bridge work

“Memory, Technology, and Wisdom”

Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 43.2 (2022), 297–321

The essay extends questions of memory and mediation from classical philosophy, Proust, and Wordsworth into digital memory systems, large language models, secondary orality, and the relation between knowledge and wisdom.

Across these works, questions about consciousness, memory, narrative, interpretation, translation, and mediation increasingly converge with computational methods and artificial intelligence.

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