| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

Rebecca Chenoweth - Mapping an Idea Test Page

Page history last edited by r_chenoweth@... 10 years, 4 months ago

My original idea was to use visualization tools to get a broader view of the narrator's role in 20th century texts that are often thought of as nonfictional, or where the speaker seems to be of primary interest to readers (and is often equated with the author).  I originally wanted to see how Christopher Isherwood's first-person narrator changes from one book to the next, so I began by using the Word Tree tool to map the words and phrases that typically follow "I" statements in his first first-person text, Goodbye to Berlin:

These are my results after I selected "I am" to be the primary phrase in my tree, as a way of measuring whether certainty or uncertainty would win out.  Before I selected this phrase, the primary one that came up was the first name "Christopher," which also positions Christopher the narrator at the center of the narrative but doesn't tell us much about how this narrator sees himself.   

 

Another text where both accuracy of memory and speaker are key is, of course, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.  There are few if any "I am" statements in this text, as even the first line seems to take us deep into the past ("For a long time I used to go to bed early.")  Here then is a word map that takes "I was" as the root:

 

I had hoped that comparing these texts via the Word Tree chart would lead me to an easier comparison between confidence in/anxiety over one's own accuracy in narration; but as I've begun to realize that many of these sentences come from dialogue with others rather than reflection on oneself as a narrator, I fear I'm becoming as uncertain as my authors of choice!

 

 

(I also tried to plug the opening chapter of the opening book (The "Overture" from Swann's Way) into Word Tree, but for some reason the program wouldn't function properly that time.  I also tried running it through the Textexture program, but it seems that the program cut off what I already believed to be a small selection (50 pages in the new Lydia Davis translation), so the map below (if you're able to access it) is sadly incomplete:

http://textexture.com/index.php?text_id=20681

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.