Erik Ketzan - Thomas Pynchon and the Digital Humanities: Computational Approaches to Style

Thomas Pynchon and the Digital Humanities

Thomas Pynchon and the Digital Humanities

Computational Approaches to Style

Erik Ketzan

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First published in Great Britain 2022

Copyright Erik Ketzan, 2022

Erik Ketzan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

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ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-1183-4

ePDF: 978-1-3502-1184-1

eBook: 978-1-3502-1185-8

Series: New Horizons in Contemporary Writing

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New Horizons in Contemporary Writing

In the wake of unprecedented technological and social change, contemporary literature has evolved a dazzling array of new forms that traditional modes and terms of literary criticism have struggled to keep up with. New Horizons in Contemporary Writing presents cutting-edge research scholarship that provides new insights into this unique period of creative and critical transformation.

Series Editors:

Martin Eve and Bryan Cheyette

Editorial Board: Sin Adiseshiah (University of Lincoln, UK), Sara Blair (University of Michigan, USA), Peter Boxall (University of Sussex, UK), Robert Eaglestone (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK), Rita Felski (University of Virginia, USA), Rachael Gilmour (Queen Mary, University of London, UK), Caroline Levine (University of WisconsinMadison, USA), Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck, University of London, UK), Adam Kelly (York University, UK), Antony Rowland (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK), John Schad (Lancaster University, UK), Pamela Thurschwell (University of Sussex, UK), Ted Underwood (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA).

Volumes in the series:

Jeanette Wintersons Narratives of Desire , Shareena Z. Hamzah-Osbourne

Transatlantic Fictions of 9/11 and the War on Terror , Susana Arajo

Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption , John McLeod

South African Literatures Russian Soul , Jeanne-Marie Jackson

The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature , Isabelle Hesse

Writing After Postcolonialism: Francophone North African Literature in Transition , Jane Hiddleston

David Mitchells Post-Secular World , Rose Harris-Birtill

New Media and the Transformation of Postmodern American Literature , Casey Michael Henry

Postcolonialism After World Literature , Lorna Burns

Jonathan Lethem and the Galaxy of Writing , Joseph Brooker

The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel , Diletta De Cristofaro

David Foster Wallaces Toxic Sexualit y, Edward Jackson

Wanderwords: Language Migration in American Literature , Maria Lauret

Northern Irish Writing After the Troubles , Caroline Magennis

Forthcoming volumes:

Contemporary Fiction, Celebrity Culture, and the Market for Modernism , Carey Mickalites

Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature , Dominic OKey

Encyclopaedism and Totality in Contemporary Fiction , Kiron Ward

Contents

Figures

Tables

Thank you to the donor individual or organization, whose identity remains unknown to me, whose extremely generous support fully funded my PhD at Birkbeck, University of London via the Digital Humanities Scholarship. Thanks equally to Martin Paul Eve, PhD supervisor and editor, whose mentorship, friendship, and much-needed whip-cracking turned a three-page outline into the book you now hold in your hands. Thanks to my second dissertation supervisor, Mark Levene, for statistical wisdom. Thanks to Samuel Thomas and Christopher Ohge for criticism and encouragement in the viva. Thanks again to these two gentlemen, as well as one anonymous reviewer, for comments on the book manuscript. Thanks to colleagues at Birkbeck and the University of London at large, especially Joe Brooker for reviewing the Mason & Dixon chapter and Martin Steer for ad hoc Python tutoring. Herzlichen Dank to the mad geniuses at the Leibniz-Institut fr Deutsche Sprache and the CLARIN project for camaraderie and introducing me to the dark arts of corpus linguistics: Andreas Witt, Oliver Schonefeld, Peter Fischer, Norman Fiedler, Peter Fankhauser, Piotr Baski, Pawe Kamocki, and Julia Wildgans. Thanks also to Jens Stegmann, Christof Schch, and Andreas van Cranenburgh for patiently answering many naive questions on corpus creation and query. Thanks to many in the Pynchon online world, especially Allen Ruch, whose website, The Libyrinth (later The Modern Word), first introduced me to Pynchon many years ago, as well as Laurence Daw, Tim Ware, and the many contributors to Pynchon Wiki , known and unknown. Thanks to the fantastic team at Bloomsbury, including Laura Cope, Ben Doyle, and Rachel Walker, as well as Shyam Sunder and the incredible copyediting team at Newgen. Thanks to the British Library, Birkbeck Library, Senate House Library, and Google Books for access to resources. To my mother the aesthete, my father the rationalist, my brother the polyglot, my sister the bibliophile, and M., for everything. Finally, hymns of thanks ( V ., 254) to Thomas Pynchon for writing these Fictions, folded acceptably between the covers of Books ( M&D , 359).

The novels and a short story collection by Thomas Pynchon are referenced parenthetically and in figures as:

You guys, youre like the Puritans are about the Bible. So hung up with words, words.