From "baby tuckoo" to "eternal imagination" : a portrait of Stephen Dedalus through corpus stylistics

This interdisciplinary study draws on digital humanities to address the understudied interplay between the discursive creation of fictional character and quantitative stylistic devices in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It specifically utilizes Michaela Mahlberg's contribution to the field of corpus stylistics to pinpoint the role of textual patterns in mirroring Stephen Dedalus' dynamic identity throughout the novel. In the first step, Paul Rayson's webbased Wmatrix is used to identify the novel's "key semantic domains" based on the written sub-corpus of the British National Corpus (BNC) which provides a roadmap for examining their materialization throughout the novel. In the second step, the novel itself is treated as a reference corpus on the basis of which each chapter's key semantic domains are pinpointed. This study posits that in each chapter of the novel Joyce employs an idiosyncratic use of language, which renders it an exemplar Bildungsroman, both structurally and stylistically.