Concordancing O. Henry's The Cop and The Anthem
A concordancer is one of the simplest but, at the same time, most powerful tools to elicit certain types of information-in a quick and effective way- from the diverse corpora available nowadays. Concordancers have been widely used in linguistics, above all in text-type studies which rely on quantitative analysis. There have been significant development in corpus linguistics during recent years. Yet linguistics is not the only field where concordancers may prove useful. Literary criticism might also be benefited from it. This paper argues for the use of concordances to literary texts.
As an extremely powerful hypothesis testing device on vast amounts of data, the computer allows controlled speculation, makes hidden structures visible, enhances at the same time imagination and checks it by inductivity, thus making higher degrees of objectivity possible. Here I choose as topic the plot and characterization and writing style in a famous short story by an American writer O. Henry, The Cop and The Anthem. The concordancing programs I use in this case is Wconcord and Wordsmith .
I load the text The Cop and The Anthem into Wordsmith. It provides some general statistics about the text:
Bytes13,892
Tokens2,374
Types965
Type/Token Ratio40.65
Standardised Type/Token48.85
Ave. Word Length4.54
Sentences117
Sent.length20.15
sd. Sent. Length16.66
Para. length1,187.00
sd. Para. length1,667.36
1-letter words85
2-letter words350
3-letter words563
4-letter words370
For this text the bytes is 13,892 and the tokens are 2,374 and the sentences are 117, which can be interpreted as a sign for a short text. Its token/ratio is 40.65.This can be interpreted as a sign for a middle-...
... middle of paper ...
... this story easily and clearly.
It’s just under the so-called capitalist democracy that Soapy attempted to seek for his special happiness from prison .He did so many evil things yet no policeman sent him to prison. Just when he was moved by an anthem and determined to start a new life he was captured by a policeman and tried for three months captivity in prison. Either on the plots or the characterization or the writing style O.Henry may be rated as a good piece of work. During the course of analyzing the concordancing of this story we are providing a motivation for reading and raising language awareness and enhancing linguistic and stylistic and literary competence and “ learners are able to use literature as a way of increasing their knowledge of English as well as to enjoy literature as to enjoy literature in English in its own right.”( Tribble/Jones 1990:78)
"Brooklyn Cop” written by Norman MacCaig, a Scottish poet, is about an American cop who roams the streets tackling crime. Our impression of the stereotypical cop changes throughout the poem as we find that he isn’t all that he is made out to be. This essay will look at how the cop is portrayed and the techniques used to give this impression of him.
Cop in the hood is a book about Peter Moskos experience as a police officer in the eastern district of Baltimore. First, as a sociologist at Harvard, he was very curious about the job of Policing. There is a lot of misconception and myth about the job so what a better way to learn than become one? His coworkers were at first wary of the Harvard liberal, expecting him to do a poor job due to being primarily concerned with his research. Police culture is naturally untrustworthy of outsiders as most citizens have no idea what the job is actually like.
"Unit 2: Reading & Writing About Short Fiction." ENGL200: Composition and Literature. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011. 49-219. Web. 19 Apr. 2014.
Anthem is a story of man’s struggle to be free and to fight the masses of conformity. It tells of human nature and the want to gain all the knowledge that one could possibly attain. Man loses his safe haven and his security when he lets this lust for knowledge overpower him and lets it be seen by others. He becomes vulnerable Like Johann Faust, Prometheus sells his life for wisdom. Unlike Faust, however, Prometheus is expelled from his society but gains his freedom of individuality and his freedom of knowledge and the ability to understand. In Anthem, Prometheus and Gaea sin against society to become singular and understanding much like Adam and Eve’s sin against God when they ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge to gain wisdom; as a result, they can be compared to each other by there desire for learning and by their damnation.
“Short Stories." Short Story Criticism. Ed. Jelena Krstovic. Vol. 127. Detroit: Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010. 125-388. Literature Criticism Online. Gale. VALE - Mercer County Community College. 28 February 2014
Wolford, Chester L. "Stephen Crane." Critical Survey of Long Fiction. Ed. Frank N. Magill. English Language Series. Vol. 2. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Salem Press, 1991.
According to Radelet & Borg (2000), deterrence was, in the past, the most frequently-cited reason for arguments in support of the death penalty. The claim stems from a belief that potential criminals will be less likely to commit severe acts of violence if they know that those who carried out similar crimes before them were put to death – in much the same way that heads on pikes at the gates of a city were intended to deter criminal activity in the Middle Ages. Recently, however, many studies have concluded that the death penalty offers no significant deterrent effects, and the few which claim to find support for these effects have received substantial criticism (Radelet & Borg, 2000). The majority of both criminologists and law enforcement officers surveyed expressed that they do not believe the death penalty offers any difference in the amount of violent crimes committed (Radelet & Borg, 2000).
Pike, Gerald. “Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers.” Short Story Criticism. Ed. Thomas Votteler. Vol. 6. Detroit: Gale Research International Limited, 1990. 90. Print.
Diction plays a critical role in the development of the tone in a story. The type of words the author uses directly leads to the tone of the entire literary work. If ...
Stillinger, Jack, Deidre Lynch, Stephen Greenblatt, and M H. Abrams. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume D. New York, N.Y: W.W. Norton & Co, 2006. Print.
The disturbing description of the serial killer is recited without any waver whatsoever away from the intent only to divulge information. The narrator makes no personal comment and expresses no opinion about Howard. After the narrator has given the information to the listener, the narrator leads the train of thought right back to the work environment. The idea of a horrible mass murderer is interrupted by his typing ability. This continued contrast now goes past unstable and borders on psychotic.
Wilson, M. & Clark, R. (n.d.). Analyzing the Short Story. [online] Retrieved from: https://www.limcollege.edu/Analyzing_the_Short_Story.pdf [Accessed: 12 Apr 2014].
Magill, Frank N., ed. Critical Survey of Short Fiction. Revised ed. Vol. 2. Pasadena: Salem Press, 1993. 7 vols.
Christ, Carol T., Catherine Robson, Stephen Greenblatt, and M. H. Abrams. The Prisoner. A Fragment. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. E. New York, NY: W.W. Norton &, 2006. 1315-316. Print.
The hotel industry is a small section of the hospitality industry. Therefore the emphasis is on communication skills, hands-on work and customer needs. This is inculcated via the coursework which teach students in current practices of front office operation, housekeeping, food and beverage administration, accounting, sales and marketing.