How to Cite
License (Chapter)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Identifiers (Book)
Published
Repetitive Research
Spitzer and Racine
Abstract This contribution attempts to retrace Leo Spitzer’s (1887–1960) famous stylistic reading of the tragedies of French seventeenth-century author Jean Racine (1639–1699) using digital text collections and computational methods of analysis available today. Spitzer’s analysis was first published in 1928 and richly illustrates the manifestations of a “dampening effect” which Spitzer claims is characteristic of Racine’s style and at the same time functions as the signature style of the French Classical period more generally. The contribution uses a mixed-methods approach, combining corpus-based modeling and reading of stylistic patterns with statistical analyses of their distribution. The present attempt to retrace Spitzer’s study not only reveals new insights into Racine’s and the Classical period’s style, but also serves to highlight the respective strengths and limitations of established (non-digital and/or hermeneutical) and computational (digital, algorithmic and/or quantitative) approaches to stylistic analysis and the contrasting notions of style which underpin them.
Keywords: Racine, Spitzer, French literature, style, replication
