Perceiving with strangeness: quantifying a style of altered consciousness as estrangement in a corpus of 1960s American science fiction

Abstract

Abstract In 1960s American science fiction, representations of altered consciousness may function as a novum, framing how protagonists perceive and interact with the storyworld, motivating their actions, and estranging readers. Representations of these states are rooted in the lexical particulars of style, which became of central concern to the rising New Wave subgenre. As a result of the defamiliarized focalization of altered consciousness, estranged readers confront in fresh ways core sociocultural concerns of the era embedded in the thematics of the novels. For this reason, it is fruitful to ask how the language of altered consciousness can be characterized. What lexical elements defamiliarize the focalization giving rise to estrangement? This paper addresses this question through a computational literary linguistic approach. Quantifying the lexical composition of altered states with content analysis dictionaries and performing cluster analysis uncovers underlying similarities within a corpus of 1960s American science fiction novels. The language of altered consciousness is then identified as a language of estrangement through stylistic close reading. This provides one route into understanding how a novum may be constructed of language, estrange the reader, and prompt reexamination of the formerly familiar through staying with strangeness.