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List of contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Some Formal Overviews of Pynchon’s Texts
Chapter 2: Archaic Stylistics in Mason & Dixon
Chapter 3: Pynchon, “The Voice of Ambiguity”, Quantified
Chapter 4: Pynchon’s Acronymania
Chapter 5: Pynchon’s Profanity, Queried and Coded
Chapter 6: Pynchon’s Ellipsis Marks: Points and Dashes
Conclusion
About the author
Erik Ketzan is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, Centre for Digital Humanities.
Summary
Thomas Pynchon’s style has dazzled and bewildered readers and critics since the 1960s, and this open access 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 ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by DARIAH-EU.
Additional text
I'm just barely digitally-literate enough to recognize how ingenious Ketzan’s book is, and what an enormous amount of work has gone into it. You can count on these findings percolating through the Pynchon scholarship over the course of the next few years. I don’t know whether this is a watershed moment in Pynchon scholarship, whatever that might mean, but I’m sure that in future no-one will want to venture claims about Pynchon’s style without first checking to see what Ketzan has discovered.
