ENG41850 Social Network Analysis & Fict

Academic Year 2020/2021

This module will introduce students to the use of computational techniques in literary analysis, giving an overview of current research internationally. It will then focus specifically on social network analysis, using the project corpus and website developed by the ‘Nation, Genre and Gender: A Comparative Social Network Analysis of Irish and English Fiction, 1800-1922’ project (supported by the Irish Research Council). The project combines literary scholarship and digital social network analysis to investigate the social imaginary of the novel in the long nineteenth century. The research combines quantitative, computational approaches with critical and interpretative tools. This combination offers new perspectives on well known texts, but also a realistic and judicious form of intense textual engagement with a radically extended canon of fiction, with its diversity of voices, genres and perspectives.
Students will be introduced to the general methodology developed by the project and the benefits and drawbacks of an inclusive approach to nodes within the novels' social networks (including unnamed characters and collectives, for example). The project’s outputs use the search functionality of the corpus to situate the social imaginary of the novels within key social and political developments and to indicate how social network analysis can inform analysis of both gender and ethnicity in fiction. Students will be trained to do this and practical experience and exercises will be provided.
Please note the mode of assessment for this module in advance.
The course will focus on 4 major texts (Pride and Prejudice, Bleak House, Phineas Finn and Portrait of the Artist) and students will work on a social network analysis of a scene from 'The Dead'.