Date of Award
1-1-2013
Document Type
Open Access Dissertation
Department
Comparative Literature
First Advisor
Paul A Miller
Abstract
For the purpose of this dissertation, the hypothesis is posited that a programmatic correlation of the poems of Lucilius and the other Satirists reveals a detailed and dense level of intertextuality, especially in those poems which scholars already understand to allude to the genre's inventor. In addition to those poems which are discussed in secondary literature, we have discovered other poems which correlate highly with the corpus of Lucilius, but have been largely ignored. To demonstrate this fact I have devised a method using Singular Value Decomposition. That method is able to discern this subtle intertextuality in both the texts in question as well as other Classical texts since our method is not language-specific. We have discerned Horace to be the most highly correlated to Lucilius, and further, poem 1.4 to be among the most highly correlated to Lucilius' fragments. In the course of writing this dissertation we will examine other poems which are found to be highly correlated to discover what we hypothesized--if there is a subtle intertextuality which has been largely ignored. We will use what I term a 'roving correlation' on target poems to pinpoint dense intertextual areas.
Rights
© 2013, Thomas Whidden
Recommended Citation
Whidden, T.(2013). Using Singular Value Decomposition in Classics: Seeking Correlations in Horace, Juvenal and Persius against the Fragments of Lucilius. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/770