The makings of digital modernism: Rereading Gertrude Stein's “The Making of Americans” and poetry by Elsa von Freytag -Loringhoven

Abstract

In this dissertation, I argue that digital methodologies offer new kinds of evidence and uncover new opportunities for changing how we do research and what we value as objects for literary study. In particular, I show how text mining, visualizations, digital editing, and social networks can be applied to make new readings of texts that have historically been undervalued within academic research. For example, I read Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans at a distance by analyzing large sets of data mined from the text and visualized within various applications. I also perform close readings of the poetry of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven differently by engaging online social networks in which textual performance, an ever-changing interpretive presentation of text, is enacted. By facilitating readings that allow submerged textual and social patterns to emerge, this research resituates digital methodologies and these modernist works within literary studies.