Is “Late Style” measurable? A stylometric analysis of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s, Robert Musil’s, and Franz Kafka’s late works

Abstract

Since the studies of Adorno, Broch, and Benn, the “late” condition of artistic creation has always been described in terms of an evident stylistic fracture. However, recent theorizations tend to evaluate it as nothing but “a critical and ideological construct” (McMullan, Smiles). With our contribution, we will test these theorizations with the computational methods of stylometry, that are generally used for authorship attribution and distant reading, and that proved to be very sensitive to the temporal component. By using the Kolimo corpus and the Stylo software, we will perform a series of broad-spectrum experiments on authors of modern German literature (Robert Musil, Franz Kafka), verifying for which authors a caesura is present on the chronological line, and if this corresponds – according to the intuition by Said – with an increased distance from contemporary authors. Special attention will be devoted to the case study of Goethe and to how stylometry imposes a re-questioning of the traditional concept of style.