The roots of doubt : fine-tuning a BERT model to explore a stylistic phenomenon

The narrative work of well-known Italian author Italo Calvino (1923-1985) features a phenomenon that literary critics refer to as “dubitative text”: this stylistic device consciously hinders the narrative progression of a story, by questioning its own content. We report on an attempt to model the presence of dubitative text in Calvino’s fictional oeuvre and examine whether this model can also be used to retrieve dubitative instances in his essayistic oeuvre. We hypothesize that precisely the category of the dubitative text yields interesting points of intersection between both writing modes. We fine-tuned a BERT model based on a manually annotated dataset and report inter-annotator scores. We situate our findings and model criticism in the current landscape of Calvino scholarship. While detecting dubitative text is challenging, our model provides fresh insights into the device’s surface features.