Thomas Pynchon and the Digital Humanities: Computational Approaches to Style (New Horizons in Contemporary Writing)

Thomas Pynchon's style has dazzled and bewildered readers and critics since the 1960s, and this book employs computational methods from the digital humanities to reveal heretofore unknown stylistic trends over the course of Pynchon's career, as well as challenge critical assumptions regarding foregrounded and supposedly “Pynchonesque” stylistic features: ambiguity/vagueness, acronyms, ellipsis marks, profanity, and archaic stylistics in __Mason & Dixon__. As the first book-length stylistic or computational stylistic examination of Pynchon's oeuvre, __Thomas Pynchon and the Digital Humanities__ provides a groundwork of stylistic experiments and interpretations, with over 60 graphs and tables, presented in a manner in which both technical and non-technical audiences may follow. "The first book-length analysis of Pynchon's style, this book uses methodologies such as computational analysis, drawn from the Digital Humanities, to reveal previously unknown stylistic trends in this much-studied author's oeuvre. In doing so, it challenges critical assumptions regarding supposedly 'Pynchonesque' stylistic features and presents the most extensive description thus far of Pynchon's 'late style'. It examines a range of texts from Pynchon's oeuvre , including Gravity's Rainbow , The Crying of Lot 49 and Mason & Dixon as well as contextualising his work alongside that of other key writers such as Toni Morrison, David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo and Stephen King."-- Provided by publisher Introduction and Definition of Style -- Chapter 1: Issues in Computational Stylistics and Digital Pynchon Studies -- Chapter 2: Corpora and Software -- Chapter 3: Some Formal Overviews of Pynchon's Texts -- Chapter 4: The Style of Mason & Dixon -- Chapter 5: Pynchon, 'The Voice of Ambiguity,' Quantified -- Chapter 6: Pynchon's Acronymania -- Chapter 7: Pynchon's Profanity, Queried and Coded -- Chapter 8: Pynchon's Ellipsis Marks: Points and Dashes Conclusion : Pynchon's 'Late Style' and Future Work -- Bibliography Cover Half Title Series Title Copyright Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments Note on the Texts Introduction 1 Some Formal Overviews of Pynchon’s Texts 2 Archaic Stylistics in Mason & Dixon 3 Pynchon, “The Voice of Ambiguity,” Quantified 4 Pynchon’s Acronymania 5 Pynchon’s Profanity, Queried and Coded 6 Pynchon’s Ellipsis Marks: Points and Dashes Conclusion Appendix I: Corpora, Software, Methods Appendix II: Literature Review of Digital Pynchon Studies Bibliography Index