Text 1

Scholarship today overrepresents experimentally fragmented narrative structures, such as that of Jean Toomer's Cane, beyond the degree to which they actually influenced fiction in the United States during the modernist period (roughly 1900-1945). Meanwhile, Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground, whose coherent, linear narrative structure recalls the fiction of previous centuries, attracts woefully little attention from scholars of modernism.

Text 2

Distant reading, or computer-assisted quantitative analysis of massive collections of digitized texts, can reveal stylistic elements that have heretofore escaped notice, despite being shared by numerous texts from the modernist period. For too long, scholars have focused on narrative fragmentation versus coherence, inhibiting inquiry into other points of stylistic correspondence among works that would enrich our understanding of the modernist canon.