- Title
- A distant reading of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf
- Creator
- Gill, Supatra
- Relation
- Tinakori: Critical Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society , Issue 1, p. 2-18
- Relation
- http://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/tinakori/
- Publisher
- Katherine Mansfield Society
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- Researching this essay and running numerous experiments has been a steep learning curve. But I was lost in Franco Moretti’s alternate universe of ‘swarms of hybrids and oddities, for which the categories of literary taxonomy offer very little help’. What has been enlightening is the study of function words and how much their use in writing and in conversations tell us about ourselves and one another. My decision to compare five short stories to see whether Distant Reading can determine the influence of one author on another has shown that word frequencies of function words alone is far from enough. Stylometry alone does not explain style and will not determine influence. David L. Hoover suggests that analysing texts word clusters and the ‘frequencies of frequent word sequences’ could offer better ways to characterise authorial style’. In examining Woolf’s use of we I discovered that there was a flaw in my method that skewed the results. When I performed the same word frequency search on Woolf’s entire collection of short stories a different result emerged. This confirms that a far greater corpus was required that should necessarily include both personal and critical writings. Both authors were prolific letter writers who also kept volumes of diaries and journals and contributed essays and criticisms by way of literature reviews.
- Subject
- Distant Reading; short story; literature; function words; Franco Moretti
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1404515
- Identifier
- uon:35352
- Identifier
- ISSN:2514-6106
- Language
- eng
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