Literary Analysis with WordPerfect 5.0 Macros

Abstract

As someone especially interested in isolating and expressing literary structure in terms of visual design and configurations, I find the new macro capability of WordPerfect 5.0 very promising. In a now antique article in the CALICO Journal, September 1984, I expressed an opinion on the usefulness of searching out verbal patterns in literary texts, especially verse, and of developing ways to make the presence of the pattern, its shape ... much easier to apprehend intellectually and experientially, and of the importance of devising ways to translate this information into a medium, say a graphics display, immediately accessible and recognizable to anyone interested in literary structure, whether researcher, teacher, or student (15). My faith in the value of such activity is still strong. Fortunately the means for such examinations are now available to almost everyone who has access to a personal computer. I have long believed computers can be used in very simple ways to examine literary texts very profitably. To do this nowadays requires no more than a basic familiarity with word processing and conventional literary intuitions and instincts. Literary researchers with unusual computer skills will continue to undertake complex projects requiring substantial technical knowledge and collegial cooperation, but those of us with modest interest or skills in computing may find a useful tool in simple search techniques like these provided by the set of sample programs demonstrated here. These macros provide a means for casual examinationlimited and selectiveof rhyme schemes, word patterning, tentative context analyses, and even imagistic characteristics. Similar macros can be written to isolate sound patterns, and abstract other rhetorical features. Our students who may not have been exposed to computing can quickly adapt to these simple techniques for looking at a text and making simple isolations with their own or laboratory word processors. Using the macros described here requires no knowledge of computing, merely some experience with word processing. They can also be he beginning of an understanding of the relatively new field of computer based stylistic analysis. In the introduction to our section in our last September's issue (1989), I suggested that we might have some such WordPerfect 5.0 analytical aids. The use of WordPerfect 4.2 macros in some similar textual manipulations has been demonstrated by Dr. Estelle Irizarry in earlier articles, especially her Clone poems... (in the same September 1989 issue mentioned above). With the appearance of WordPerfect 5.0 (and subsequent versions), it is now possible not only to extend the variety of string isolations but to present printed, readable versions of the specific macros that you can then duplicate by copying them into your macro editor. This editor makes the descriptions easier, and it is also much more powerful than the 4.2 facility. Put simply, it has become a surprisingly versatile programming capability. In order to demonstrate some of its potential for developing ways to expand the use of the word processor as a tool for illuminating literary texts, I have chosen to duplicate some of the types of string isolations and other procedures that I devised a number of years ago on a Univac mainframe computer, manipulations that now can be carried out today much more easily and quickly on your own desktop computer at home. The concepts and macros are simple ones, yet they may prove useful to you. Their simplicity is actually their greatest merit, since relatively little expertise in computers is needed to utilize them.1 Casual or fishing searches that they encourage often turn up patterns not specifically anticipated and lead to discoveries we did not expect.