Abstract
Themes (or semantic fields), rather than individual words are used to study texts from a literary point of view. The approach — Z scores, and a Poisson distribution as a model for distribution — owes much to classical inferential statistics, but the aim of this work is to use statistics as a descriptive rather than a predictive tool. Frequencies of words evoking the themes of night, happiness and claustration were drawn from three Frequency Dictionaries (Juilland, 1970; Imbs, 1971; Engwall, 1984), and used to extrapolate “predicted” frequencies of these themes in four modern French novels. The novels studied were Gide,l'Immoraliste (1902); Céline,Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932); Sartre,la Nausée (1938), and Robbe-Grillet,la Jalousie. The results corresponded to known and documented literary phenomena or could be explained in terms of such phenomena. The approach chosen thus has some usefulness.
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Paul A. Fortier is a Professor of French Literature at the University of Manitoba, member of the Committee of the ALLC, and Vice-President of the ACH. He has published studies of novels by Gide, Celine, and Robbe-Grillet, and is currently working on Sartre's la Nausée.
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Fortier, P.A. Some statistics of themes in the French novel. Comput Hum 23, 293–299 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02176634
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02176634