Analysis of Angela Carter's Short Story Reflections via Text Mining and Evaluation in a Symbolic Context

Abstract

Text mining is a methodology that includes computer-based algorithms that use special approaches and methods in the fields of machine learning, statistics, and linguistics to extract meaningful patterns from written texts. In the last decade, text mining has become one of the crucial research areas that plays a critical role in the analysis of literary text. For this purpose, in the article, it is aimed to reveal a remarkable interdisciplinary study that combines text mining and comparative literature science. Thus, Angela Carter's short story, Reflections which is one of the important works of post-modern literature, has been analyzed by applying the natural language processing methods. Unexpected, interesting keywords such as knitting, mirror, forest, seashell, room, and world were extracted from the text. In the study, these keywords have been evaluated in terms of their symbolic meanings. As a result, it has been determined that the implicit meanings and mother archetype representations of the keywords form the whole of symbolic expressions reflecting Carter's literary style and enrich the narrative.