Analyzing the Positive Sentiment Towards the Term “Queer’’ in Virginia Woolf through a Computational Approach and Close Reading

This article validates the thesis that Virginia Woolf’s usage of the term “queer’’ is positive, and that the author is more progressive with her idea of things conceived as “queer’’ in the era characterized as literary Modernism and in English fiction as a whole from 1850s to 1990s. Using Word2Vec, a word embedding model, I locate the top 100 words semantically closest to “queer’’ in Woolf’s works and in the works of other modernist authors, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, D. H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, and Katherine Mansfield. I then measure the net positivity of each author’s list and compare Woolf’s with the individual authors’, and then with words closest to “queer’’ in English fiction from 1850 to 2000. In demonstrating the usefulness of applying word embedding models in literary criticism, a field that has traditionally primarily relied on interpretation, this article aims to serve as a case study of how a computational approach can benefit close reading.