A Phenomenology of the Present: Toward a Digital Understanding of Gravity’s Rainbow

Abstract

This essay presents the results produced by the application of three corpus analysis tools to Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow: word frequency/keyness analysis, social network analysis, and topic modeling. It uses these data to argue that the novel is peculiarly concerned with the concept of the present moment. Engaging along the way traditional arguments about the nature of the book’s Romanticism and its sense of “connectedness,” the essay demonstrates how distant reading can aid us in perceiving aspects of overwhelming texts that are not easy to perceive otherwise, consequently complementing rather than opposing close reading practices.