Supplementary Materials to The Self-Destructing Text: Hermann Broch's "Der Tod des Vergil" and the Limits of Avant-Garde Narrative

Dissertation for the Graduate School at the Pennsylvania State University by Jake van der Kolk, Ph.D.

My dissertation, which I defended in August 2017, shows how Hermann Broch's novel Der Tod des Vergil (1945) deliberately frustrates reading in order to critique the avant-garde from within. It includes a significant digital humanities component relating to two aspects:

1. Erzählzeit-to-erzählte Zeit Density. Here, I compared how long Broch's inner monologue (i.e. stream-of-consciousness) novel would take to read in relation to the amount of time it depicts, providing a "number of words per hour depicted" ration. This number was compared to that of other inner monologue texts to demonstrate Tod des Vergil's relative density.
2. Associative Meanings. I argue that apparent symbols in Tod des Vergil do not have fixed meanings, but rather signify according to non-semantic associations, most notably other words that appear in close proximity. Correspondingly, I measured out the meanings of specific terms by plotting out the terms that appear near them the most disproportionately.

My dissertation will soon be available through the Penn State Graduate Thesis Database and later in other to-be-determined publications.

In this repository, you can find additional materials used in my dissertation, including:

• A digitized copy of Hermann Broch's Der Tod des Vergil (1945) under the raw-text folder.
• Working textual manipulation scripts used in the quantitative analysis of Broch's text under the scripts folder.
• The resulting statistical breakdowns of the above text in the statistics folder.

Each folder provides further descriptions of their contents.