Cow Country

Ware's Critique

• Although there’s always a first time, Pynchon has never written in the first person, and Cow Country is in the first person.
• Right out of the gate, Cow Country sounds nothing like Pynchon… none of his style, grace, wit, voice, subtlety.
• Pynchon has his own work agenda, with a pipeline of novels in various states of completion. That he would take the time to write a “spoof” on the publishing business and exagerated importance given to author biographies — a work of 540 pages, no less — is silly. Let’s just say he has bigger fish to fry…

Stylometry

• Stylistic naturalism.
• Subconscious features.
• Author signal is strongest signal.

Burrows's Delta

• Take average word-frequency in each text.
• Create z-scores for each word's variance from average.
• Plot and sum the Manhattan distance of the multidimensional space plots.

80% consensus 30-100 MFWs Delta Clustering 1-gram

80% consensus 30-100 MFWs Delta Clustering 3-grams

More Frequent Trigrams in GR

• “a couple of”
• “to be a”
• “out of the”
• “in front of”

90% consensus 30-100 MFWs Delta Clustering 2-grams

The End

Thank you!