The Failure of Form: Reading Liminality Computationally in Dostoevskii’s <i>The Double</i>

Abstract This article uses computational text analysis to examine Fedor Dostoevskii’s The Double , responding to the long-standing critical debates surrounding the text and particularly its form, which Dostoevskii saw as having failed his idea. It asserts that the problem of the ontological status of Goliadkin’s double can be productively considered through an analysis of the text’s use of liminality, a hallmark of romantic fantastic literature. TEI-XML encoding of liminality identified in the text enables a series of visualizations that show that liminality is primarily concentrated in interior spaces. Analyzing the visualizations, the authors argue that liminality is associated with Goliadkin’s social shame, suggesting that the double is an extension of Goliadkin’s psychology rather than a fantastic apparition. Using The Double as a case study, the authors argue that computational text analysis can extend and enrich traditional philological methods by enabling deep structural analysis of the text.