From Modernity to Post-Modernity: Conflicting Voices in Literary Discourse – A Corpus Analysis of You and One

Abstract

This paper discusses the possibilities of a corpus analysis applied to literary study and interpretation. It is thus its goal to present some findings related to the disambiguation of some pronominal references, i.e. you and one, as they occur in speech and thought presentation in prose fiction, across periods in the 20th century. The texts selected are two of Virginia Woolf’s novels (early and late modernist period) and one by Hugo Hamilton (in the postmodern era). The analysis benefits from a multi-layered interpretive framework drawing on discourse analysis, corpus-based approaches and literary study, particularly in that it unpacks ways in which writers make use of linguistic structures. These involve readers in a dialogic interpretation of the text’s “polyphony” and “heteroglossia”, either conveying the generic pronoun reference or the protagonist’s inner voice.