Archival Report from Katie Muth, BAAS Founders’ Award Recipient 2015

[Dave Monroe]

   "The Boeing archive houses some of American novelist Thomas
Pynchon’s earliest published writings, and while it is well known that
Pynchon wrote for Boeing between the years of 1960 and 1962 while
drafting his first novel V. (1963), researchers have yet to fully
understand the relationship between Pynchon’s technical writing and
his imaginative prose. The technical articles Pynchon drafted for the
Bomarc Service Newswere not widely circulated, given the sensitivity
of the material they contained, so few scholars interested in this
period of Pynchon’s writing career have been able to read the entire
run. As far as I know, Boeing holds the only complete run of its
internally produced service bulletins, and I was fortunate enough to
spend a few days with the Service News in April 2015.

[...]

"... the authorship attribution algorithm—in concert with some
additional analysis, computational and human—has allowed me to
identify the most important features distinguishing Pynchon’s likely
contributions to the BSN from those of other Boeing staff writers. In
other words, I was able to identify the ‘hallmarks’ of Pynchon’s
technical prose. These, it turns out, are not quite what readers of
Pynchon might expect. And they have, I will argue, important
implications for the way we understand Pynchon’s early novels and
stories and for the way we read postwar American fiction more broadly.

"I am currently in the process of writing up my findings for
publication and look forward to updating readers of American Studies
in Britain with further details once that publication is in press...."

[...]


http://www.baas.ac.uk/muthfoundersaward2015/
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l