The reasons why Wanda Tinasky not be Thomas Pynchon: a case study (I)

• Autor(a) principal: Brandão, Saulo Cunha de Serpa
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Texto digital
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/textodigital/article/view/1807-9288.2018v14n2p144

This paper reports a practical experience in which I use some Neolo software function to analyze three groups of texts: 1. Non-fictional writings by Thomas Pynchon; 2. The letters of Wanda Tinasky; and, 3. the Letters that were published in reaction to Wanda's ideas in the same newspaper. The goal is to show that it is possible to prove that Pynchon did not write Wanda's letters as some specialists in the work of the fictionist believed. Professor Donald Foster has already proven this by following a traditional, historical investigation. In this paper, I will demonstrate how the distinction can be made from computational analysis and attends to quantitative, qualitative methods and allied to some historical data to strengthen the proposal. A final goal I aim at with this work is to demonstrate that it takes no bold and complex formulas to do the job of distinguishing authors' style.