Digital Literary Analysis of Ahmadou Kourouma’s Quand on refuse on dit non through Corpus Stylistics: the Use of AntConc
Keywords:
Computer-assisted literary analysis, dematerialized text, Ivorian-ness, Postcolonial theory, digital text analysisAbstract
Corpus stylistics as part of corpus linguistics is interested in the analysis of literary texts. It has been reinforced through the recent development of analytical software in digital humanities, though its application to francophone African texts has not been fully exploited. This study, which combines qualitative and quantitative methodologies, deploys postcolonial theory and AntConc for the analysis of Ahmadou Kourouma’s dematerialized text, Quand on refuse on dit non (QOR), a work that belongs to the author’s trilogy on African intra/interethnic wars. The corpus analysis investigates how outputs of AntConc analytical tools of concordance, clusters, Keywords among other programs help in the postcolonial interpretation of the writer’s artistic ideology on the Ivorian interethnic conflict. By Word Hit of QOR, Houphouet Boigny is ranked 52 with the Freq of 90, followed by Gbagbo who ranks 60 with 75 Freq with Concordance Hits of 34 for “mort” (death), Ahmadou Kourouma implicates the two political Ivorian figures in the Ivorian crisis whose only language is death, the death of the perceived enemy tribesmen and women. In this civil war, the necropolitical power (Achille Mbembe) to determine who lives or dies is based on the political concept of ivoirité (Ivorian-ness) which has about 35 hits in the text, underlying how language instrumentalized the atrocities of the Ivorian civil war through the postcolonial dynamics of otherness, subalternity and identity. These findings demonstrate the value of using computational tools like AntConc to interrogate African francophone literary texts and lay a strong foundation for further studies.
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