Research on the Rise of Digital Humanities and the Turn of Literary Study Based on AntConc

Abstract

This paper involves the way of applying corpus-based empirical analyses to the study of literature. Benjy's section in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury is used as the corpus and imported into AntConc 3.5.8 (Windows) 2019, a corpus analysis software able to identify textual features of an author or a particular text. With the help of AntConc, this paper explores the narrative, semantic, lexical and syntactic idiosyncrasies of the corpus so as to delve into the mind style of Benjy. It is found that the chaotic narrative order, the absence of human actor, the deviance in collocation, the limitation in lexis, the simplicity in sentence structure and the abundant use of direct speech are all clues to Benjy's uncomprehending mind. It is hoped that this paper can promote further integration of digital humanities and literary study.