Wednesday, August 03, 2011
Heart of Darkness: Some Working Papers
I have prepared threeworking papers based on my Heart of Darkness commentary to date. These are available on my SSRN (Social Science Research Network) page as follows:
Abstract: Heart of Darkness is a novella that is roughly 38,000 words long and divided into three sections. The longest paragraph in the text, the nexus, is in the second half of the second of the three sections. It is structurally central to the text, making it a tale3 (the nexus) within a tale2 (Marlow’s tale) within a tale1 (the unnamed narrator’s tale). Within the nexus we find a phrase, a so-called Latour Litany, that spans the ontological dimensions of the story. This paper concludes with an annotated copy of the nexus paragraph.
Includes these posts:
- “Ontology at the Heart of Darkness”
- “The Heart of Heart of Darkness”
- “Heart of Darkness 6: Some Informal Notes about the Nexus”
Abstract: Heart of Darkness is a novella that is roughly 38,000 words long and divided into three sections. Paragraphs range in length from 4 words to just over 1500. The overall distribution is exponential with a mean of 193 words and a median of 129. When the distribution is charted with the paragraphs in serial order the picture is ‘spiky’ with an envelope having a crude pyramidal form. The distributions of individual sections are exponential, but with different means and medians and with different serial shapes. It is suggested that such distributions are an aspect of prose form.
This is a more complete version of the information originally in “HD7: Digital Humanities Sandbox Goes to the Congo.” In particular I’ve included separate distributions for each of the chapters of the text.
Abstract: Heart of Darkness is a novella that is roughly 38,000 words long and divided into three sections. The story is more or less about an enigmatic figure named Kurtz. If one counts each occurrence of the word “Kurtz,” notes its position in the text, and then creates a periodogram of those positions, one sees that “Kurtz” appears in cycles, with the periodicity having two components, one roughly three or four times longer than the other. This periodicity coincides with critical features in paragraph length distribution, which are also identified through qualitative analysis.
This is post 9: “Conrad’s Special K: Periodicity in Heart of Darkness”