mauve

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Well, Robert Musil opens his opus magnum with weather ("Über dem Atlantik befand sich ein barometrisches Minimum ..."), and Uwe Johnson ("Lange Wellen treiben schräg gegen den Strand ...") too! That you cannot do that in literary art is a commonplace and as such wrong.

There's also an academic approach called Digital Humanities (and in this context the "somewhat arbitrarily chosen" lists are an issue that they at least try to deal with in a methodological way). Here's an example from the Stanford Literary Lab:

Between Canon and Corpus:
Six Perspectives on 20th-Century Novels

Mark Algee-Hewitt/Mark McGurl

https://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet8.pdf

With (a little) Pynchon content.


Am 21.03.2017 um 11:00 schrieb Jochen Stremmel:
For me the biggest surprise was that Elmore Leonard actually opened two books with weather! Must have been early ones, Westerns I presume. Will look it up the next time I raise from my desk.

2017-03-21 10:57 GMT+01:00 John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com<mailto:sundayjb at gmail.com>>:
Haven't read it but have read a bunch of stories about it. The author probably knew that a book applying data journalism to literature would get lots of press. The "somewhat arbitrarily" chosen list of 50 authors is a shortcoming, and it would be much more interesting if he'd sorted 500+ writers, since data journalism with a sample size of 50 is kind of not really data journalism.
But the conclusions he comes to aren't as offensive as I expected and you can take them or leave them as you see fit. The observation that 45 percent of Danielle Steele's first sentences involve the weather - that's fun. And James Patterson's astonishing use of cliche - I know for a fact that Patterson just plots his books and farms the actual writing out to ghostwriters, so that's no surprise.

On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 8:29 PM, Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com<mailto:jstremmel at gmail.com>> wrote:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/one-writer-used-statistics-reveal-secrets-what-makes-great-writing-180962515/

Has anybody of you read this book?



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