Maciej Kurzynski

My research spans the fields of distributional semantics, cognitive literary studies, and intellectual history. I analyze a large corpus of texts produced in post-1949 China to understand the relationships between vocabularies, affects, and Chinese nationalism. The quantitative perspective, by offering new scales through which to read the novel, allows me to zoom out from an individual writer’s literary output to instead analyze its embeddedness within much larger semantic fields. The affective analysis makes it possible to elucidate the emotional activity of literary characters, and hence, to identify the subject positions, imaginations, and sentiments endorsed or rejected by the party-state. By reading both official and unofficial fiction according to the results of quantitative analysis, I attempt to understand the ways in which writers and intellectuals appeal to human emotionality and engage with the PRC nationalism.