KEYNESS IN LITERARY TEXT (BASED ON THE NOVEL «THE HANDMAID’S TALE» BY M. ATWOOD)

Abstract

The article deals with the automatic detection and further analysis of the key lexical items in the novel «The Handmaid’s Tale» by the prominent Canadian postmodern author Margaret Atwood. The aim of the study is to elaborate an efficient methodology of a corpus-driven extraction of key words and phrases from literary text. Keyness analysis serves as a significant component of the content analysis of the works of art providing clues about prevailing themes, motifs and messages conveyed by the author as well as illuminating insights into the author’s narrative style. The keyness in the novels by M. Atwood has not been subject to scrutiny before. The conducted study consisted of several stages according to the tasks set: 1) the corpus of the text of the novel under analysis has been created and annotated; 2) the comparable reference corpus to detect the key items has been selected and applied; 3) the automatic keyness analysis has been conducted, followed by the further interpretation of the findings. The Sketch Engine corpus tool based on simple math for keywords has been used in order to process the data. In the course of the analysis, the following key lexical items have been identified: author's neologisms created by M. Atwood to describe the social order in the dystopia called Gilead (Gilead, Aunt, Commander, Handmaid, Econowife, Unwomen, Mayday, Prayvaganza, Salvagings, Birthmobile, etc.), to describe the interior (sitting room, white curtain, sitting room door, kitchen table, white cloth, birthing stool, window seat, double door, back door, folding wooden chair), to describe the routine and duties of Handmaids (nightgown, rustle (of a dress), bedsheet, dishtowel, hand lotion, paper napkin; to kneel, to outspread, to unbutton), colours (red, white), etc. According to the part of speech, the highest keyness score is observed in pronouns (2.7), followed by adverbs (1.5), and verbs (1.3). The implications of the conducted analysis go beyond the study of the chosen sample of text in view of the fact that the procedure applied to automatically detect key lexical items can be implemented both for literary and non-literary texts. However, the interpretation of the keyness in literary texts requires more subtle content and discourse analyses.