Exploring Literary Analysis in a Digital Age: Close-and Distant Reading with Voyant Tools

My project presentation, titled "Exploring Literary Analysis in a Digital Age: Close-and Distant Reading with Voyant Tools," aims to address the space between close and distant reading strategies using the program Voyant Tools to supplement my literary analysis of Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). I put two distinct methods of literary analysis in conversation with each other to set the grounds for intertwining technical and digital modes of reading and writing about literature. The scope of my work lies in affective and environmental theories, which allow me to focus my exploration on using automated text-readers to bridge close and distant readings. To best analyze the way in which Döblin's constructed atmospheres relate to modernist selfhood, my work identifies the common grounds of environment and identity. My writing outlines the applications of literary theory in my analysis, and it also includes visualizations from Voyant. The figures act as images through which I establish a way for close and distant reading to act as one method as opposed to separate approaches to understanding an author's work. By doing so, this project constructs a new perspective for navigating how digital humanities supplements English studies.