Thomas Pynchon and the Digital Humanities: Computational Approaches to Style

287 Pages·2021·24.312 MB·English

by  Erik Ketzan

Thomas Pynchon and the

Digital Humanities
New Horizons in Contemporary Writing
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Thomas Pynchon and the

Digital Humanities
Computational Approaches to Style
Erik Ketzan
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Contents

List of Illustrations viii
Acknowledgments xii
Note on the Texts xiii
Introduction 1
1 Some Formal Overviews of Pynchon’s Texts 15
1.1 Pynchon’s Productivity 15
1.2 Direct Discourse, Narration, and Verse 16
1.2.1 Songs/Poems Are Decreasing in Pynchon 18
1.2.2 Direct Discourse Is Increasing in Pynchon 22
1.2.3 Reading Dialogue and Character in Pynchon 24
1.3 Formal Overviews: Conclusion 29
2 Archaic Stylistics in Mason & Dixon 35
2.1 Capitalized Nouns 35
2.1.1 Capitalization in Pynchon: Scholarly Response 40
2.1.2 Querying and Close Reading Pynchon’s Irregular
Capitalization 44
2.2 Archaic Spelling, Especially <-ick> 48
2.3 Religious/Profane Censorship 51
2.4 Archaic Use of Apostrophes 54
2.5 Archaic Pronouns and Verbs 58
2.6 Archaic Language and the Sacred/Profane in Pynchon’s Texts 59
2.7 Archaic Stylistics in Mason & Dixon: Conclusion 64
3 Pynchon, “The Voice of Ambiguity,” Quantified 73
3.1 Ambiguity in Pynchon Studies 74
3.1.1 “Ambiguous” 76
3.1.2 “Ambiguity” Queried 79
3.2 Vagueness Words and Phrases 85
3.2.1 The Hiller/Hogenraad Vagueness Dictionary 86
3.2.2 Pynchon’s “Preferred” Vagueness Words 97
vi Contents
3.2.3 A Brief Detour with Its 98
3.2.4 Pynchon’s “Preferred” Vagueness Words, Continued 102
3.2.5 The Least Vague Passages in Bleeding Edge 104
3.3 Ambiguity/Vagueness: Conclusion 107
4 Pynchon’s Acronymania 115
4.1 Acronym Query 116
4.2 Calculated Overuse of Acronyms 121
4.3 Acronyms as Parody, Play, and Central Enigma 124
4.4 Acronymania: Conclusion 128
5 Pynchon’s Profanity, Queried and Coded 133
5.1 Profanity Queries and Changes to Profanity in English 135
5.2 A Very Brief History of Obscenity Prosecutions of Literature
in Twentieth-Century America 142
5.3 Profanity in Pynchon’s Juvenilia and Early Short Stories 144
5.4 Profanity in V. and “The Secret Integration” 152
5.5 Profanity in The Crying of Lot 49 158
5.6 Pynchon’s Profanity: Conclusion 160
6 Pynchon’s Ellipsis Marks: Points and Dashes 171
6.1 A Brief History of Ellipsis Marks in English Literature 173
6.2 Ellipsis Marks in Pynchon and Comparison Corpora 176
6.3 Ellipsis Words 181
6.4 From Frequency to Close(r) Reading 181
6.5 Ellipsis Marks and Speech 187
6.6 Ellipsis Marks and Verse 189
6.6.1 Rilke’s Ellipses 190
6.6.2 Emily Dickinson’s Dashes 194
6.7 Ellipsis Marks: Conclusion 199
Conclusion 207
Appendix I: Corpora, Software, Methods 211
I.1 Pynchon Corpus 211
I.1.1 Normalization of Mason & Dixon 212
I.2 Us vs. Them: Comparison Corpora 213
I.2.1 Influence Corpus 217
I.3 Software 219
Contents vii
I.4 Statistics 220
I.5 Shared Data 221
Appendix II: Literature Review of Digital Pynchon Studies 227
Bibliography 239
Index 265
Illustrations
Figures
1.1 Narration, direct discourse, and verse in Pynchon corpus 19
1.2 Normalized frequency (per 100k word tokens) of verse in
Pynchon corpus 20
1.3 Visualization of songs and poems in Pynchon corpus 21
1.4 Proportion of direct discourse in Pynchon and comparison corpora 23
1.5 Proportion of direct discourse in Pynchon corpus 24
2.1 Query of irregularly capitalized words in Gravity’s Rainbow 45
3.1 Manfred Pinkal’s typology of the indefinite 74
3.2 Normalized frequency of ambiguous and its word forms 80
3.3 Normalized frequency of 377 words and phrases from the
Hiller/Hogenraad vagueness dictionary 88
3.4 Normalized frequency of Categories 1–9 of the Hiller/
Hogenraad vagueness dictionary 89
3.5 Normalized frequency of Category 1 of Hiller/Hogenraad
vagueness dictionary 90
3.6 Normalized frequency of Category 2 of Hiller/Hogenraad
vagueness dictionary 90
3.7 Normalized frequency of Category 3 of Hiller/Hogenraad
vagueness dictionary 91
3.8 Normalized frequency of Category 4 of Hiller/Hogenraad
vagueness dictionary 91
3.9 Normalized frequency of Category 5 of Hiller/Hogenraad
vagueness dictionary 92
3.10 Normalized frequency of Category 6 of Hiller/Hogenraad
vagueness dictionary 92
3.11 Normalized frequency of Category 7 of Hiller/Hogenraad
vagueness dictionary 93
3.12 Normalized frequency of Category 8 of Hiller/Hogenraad
vagueness dictionary 93
Illustrations ix
3.13 Normalized frequency of Category 9 of Hiller/Hogenraad
vagueness dictionary 94
3.14 Normalized frequency of Category 10 of Hiller/Hogenraad
vagueness dictionary 94
3.15 Chapter 17 of Inherent Vice, with Hiller/Hogenraad vagueness
words highlighted 96
3.16 Normalized frequency of forty-nine vagueness words/phrases
in Pynchon corpus 100
3.17 Normalized frequency of “its” in Pynchon corpus 101
3.18 Normalized frequency of “its” in Pynchon chapters and episodes 101
3.19 Normalized frequency of forty-eight of Pynchon’s “preferred
vagueness words” in chapters and episodes 103
3.20 Normalized frequency of forty-eight of Pynchon’s “preferred
vagueness words” in chapters of Bleeding Edge 107
4.1 Normalized frequency of acronyms in Pynchon corpus 117
4.2 Word cloud of acronyms in Pynchon corpus by frequency 118
4.3 Normalized frequency of types of acronyms in Pynchon corpus 118
4.4 Normalized frequency of acronyms in Pynchon and
comparison corpora 122
4.5 Normalized frequency of acronym types in Pynchon and
comparison corpora 123
5.1 Normalized frequency of “lesser” profanity in Pynchon corpus 137
5.2 Normalized frequency of “lesser” profanity in direct discourse
in Pynchon corpus 137
5.3 Normalized frequency of “lesser” profanity in narration in
Pynchon corpus 138
5.4 Normalized frequency of “greater” profanity in Pynchon corpus 138
5.5 Normalized frequency of “greater” profanity in direct discourse
in Pynchon corpus 139
5.6 Normalized frequency of “greater” profanity in narration in
Pynchon corpus 139
5.7 Normalized frequency of select profanity in Pynchon and
comparison corpora, in chronological order 140
5.8 Normalized frequency of profanity in chapters of V. 154
5.9 Textual variation between excerpt of The Crying of Lot 49 in
Esquire (1965) and the published novel (1966) 160
6.1 Normalized frequency of ellipsis points in Pynchon corpus 176