Source Texts
Text
Text 1
Scholarship today overrepresents experimentally fragmented narrative structures, such as that of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, beyond the degree to which they actually influenced fiction in Britain and Ireland during the modernist period (roughly 1900-1945). Meanwhile, Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September, whose coherent, linear narrative structure recalls the fiction of previous centuries, attracts woefully little attention from scholars of modernism.
Text 2
Distant reading, or computer-assisted quantitative analysis of massive collections of digitized texts, can reveal stylistic elements that have heretofore escaped notice, despite being shared by numerous texts from the modernist period. For too long, scholars have focused on narrative fragmentation versus coherence, inhibiting inquiry into other points of stylistic correspondence among works that would enrich our understanding of the modernist canon.
Scholarship today overrepresents experimentally fragmented narrative structures, such as that of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, beyond the degree to which they actually influenced fiction in Britain and Ireland during the modernist period (roughly 1900-1945). Meanwhile, Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September, whose coherent, linear narrative structure recalls the fiction of previous centuries, attracts woefully little attention from scholars of modernism.
Text 2
Distant reading, or computer-assisted quantitative analysis of massive collections of digitized texts, can reveal stylistic elements that have heretofore escaped notice, despite being shared by numerous texts from the modernist period. For too long, scholars have focused on narrative fragmentation versus coherence, inhibiting inquiry into other points of stylistic correspondence among works that would enrich our understanding of the modernist canon.