Periodizing Samuel Beckett’s Works: A Stylochronometric Approach

Abstract

seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents. 1 <CT>Periodizing Samuel Beckett's Works: A Stylochronometric Approach 1 <CA>Dirk van Hulle and Mike Kestemont <AFF>UNIVERSITY OF ANTWERP <abs>ABSTRACT:We report the first analysis of Samuel Beckett's prose writings using stylometry, or the quantitative study of writing style, focusing on grammatical function words, a linguistic category that has seldom been studied before in Beckett studies. To these function words, we apply methods from computational stylometry and model the stylistic evolution in Beckett's oeuvre. Our analyses reveal a number of discoveries that shed new light on existing periodizations in the secondary literature, which commonly distinguish an "early," "middle," and "late" period in Beckett's oeuvre. We analyze Beckett's prose writings in both English and French, demonstrating notable symmetries and asymmetries between both languages. The analyses nuance the traditional three-part periodization as they show the possibility of stylistic relapses (disturbing the linearity of most periodizations) as well as different turning points depending on the language of the corpus, suggesting that Beckett's English oeuvre is not identical to his French oeuvre in terms of patterns of stylistic development.

Style and chronology: A stylometric investigation of Aphra Behn’s dramatic style and the dating of The Young King

“…Although some authorship studies remove pronouns (e.g. Binongo, 2003; Hoover, 2007), van Hulle and Kestemont (2016: 182) argue persuasively that this category may reflect particular ‘stylistic shifts’ relevant for stylochronometric periodization, hence their retention here.…”

“…The top 300 words are used in the statistical analysis; MFW measures appear most robust for stylochronometry when using 100–500 words (e.g. van Hulle and Kestemont, 2016).…”

“…The second lexical measure calculates the distribution of most frequent function words in the dataset (MF-FWs). These words are extracted from the same word-list produced for the MFWs (following van Hulle and Kestemont (2016)). MF-FWs include pronouns, modal and auxiliary verbs.…”

“…Stylochronometric analysis of literary writing encourages us to ‘reassess critical commonplaces’ (van Hulle and Kestemont, 2016: 197) concerning writers, works and periods (for a survey, see Stamou, 2008). For example, van Hulle and Kestemont test the traditional periodization of Beckett’s French and English fictional prose, and find that stylometric methods affirm the more intuitive pronouncements of previous critics.…”

“…McMullan (2007) on Shakespeare). Yet, as van Hulle and Kestemont (2016) recently observed, literary periodization is traditionally founded on expert intuition, rather than a systematic analysis of linguistic evidence.…”