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Elisa Beshero-Bondar edited this page Apr 19, 2018 · 14 revisions

"Regularly Gay" - A Textual Study of Repetition and Semantic Meaning in Gertrude Stein's "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene" Using Digital Methods

Abstract

Due to Gertrude Stein’s avant-guard style of writing, the heavy use of repetition within her short story “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” presents the reader with a fragmentary text. This complex mix of words and phrases within the work contain a rather simple narrative. It is one that mirrors the real-world homosexual relationship of Stein’s two close friends, Maud Hunt Squire and Ethel Mars. Because of Stein’s associations with the homosexual community, a reader may be tempted to conflate the story with these themes. However, we can choose to draw literary meaning in a formalist way from the text alone, or a contextual way by investigating its context. If we choose a formalist approach, we concentrate on the semantics intrinsic to the writing. For example, the word gay appears within “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” a total of one hundred and thirty-two times. The Oxford English Dictionary points to this story specifically as being the first recorded use of the word gay, as connoting homosexuality. By removing both the historical and authorial context from the work, this paper will conduct an internal analysis of the language in “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” in the attempt to test whether this connotation is internally supported. In order to conduct this examination of the text, computational methods are required to deconstruct the elements of repetition that distinguish Stein’s style of writing and to isolate specific semantic meanings from the words used. The computational analysis may help to avoid the phenomenon known as semantic satiation which can obscure semantic meaning due to the way in which human readers cognitively process repeated words and phrases. Digital methods, including those used in distant reading, prove important to this kind of textual micro-analysis where they assist in eliminating possible distortions caused by a reader’s pre-conceived notion of context.

Methods

  1. XML - PLACEHOLDER
  2. XPath -
  3. Python -
  4. WordNet -
  5. Cytoscape -
  6. GitHub -

Terms

  • PLACEHOLDER
  • PLACEHOLDER
  • PLACEHOLDER
  • PLACEHOLDER

NOTE: This is a work in progress and will be updated as the work continues with this project.

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