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jonhoranic 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, a work and its text are separate entities, meaning that the text of a literary piece can be understood without outside context. Textual meaning is therefore dependent on semantic constructs alone, whereas literary meaning associates context with the work. 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 a solely textual analysis of “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” in the attempt to test this connotation. In order to conduct this examination of the text, computational methods are required to fully deconstruct the elements of repetition that distinguish Stein’s style of writing and to isolate specific semantic meanings from the words used. This is done 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. These digital tools prove important to this kind of textual analysis because it helps 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 -

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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