engleski

Computational concordance analysis of fictional literary work

Fictional literary work, in the case of the dystopian genre, could be exemplified in the context of totalitarian utopia of George Orwell’s novel 1984. The terms and concepts of the novel have been subject of a vast and storied critical reception, especially regarding the terminology concerning what makes this particular fictional literary work an ideal example of dystopian literature. Many of the terms used in 1984 have been in common use in the English language since the date of the novel’s publication. The main hypothesis in this paper is that terms related to the Orwellian concept, such as “Big Brother” or “Newspeak”, are applied in an affirmative and positive way, and that a computer is not suitable for distinguishing the totalitarian implications of those terms, as computers are inherently not able to put them in the context that is in fact a dystopian work of fiction and that the novel’s characters employ these terms as a mean of, in the novel’s expression, thought control. The aim of this paper is to examine, through the application of computational analysis of concordances, the possibilities to measure the true, totalitarian nature of the concepts and catchphrases used affirmatively by the characters in the text of Orwell’s 1984.

computational concordance analysis ; natural language processing ; context analysis ; fictional work ; information science

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