Abstract
The Anthropocene’s far-reaching environmental consequences necessitate innovative approaches to understanding ecological consciousness. While ecocriticism has gained traction in literary studies, most research in the field focuses on isolated geographic and cultural contexts. This project bridges that divide by employing computational methods to comparatively analyze environmental narratives. Drawing on the concept of Distant Reading, this research offers a comparative analysis of environmental narratives in eight novels from American and African literary traditions: Ayi Kwei Armah’s Healers (1979), Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2010), Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991), Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), Louise Erdrich’s Tracks (1998), Donna Barba Higuera’s The Last Cuentista (2021), Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), and Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021). Using R-based visualizations, this study reveals cross-cultural patterns and variations in ecological themes, sentiment, and vocabulary. The findings reveal topic modeling networks that map the intersection of environmental and cultural themes across the novels. Secondly, sentiment analysis charts that track shifts in environmental consciousness across different temporal and geographical contexts; and lastly, word frequency distributions that highlight regional variations in ecological vocabulary which helped to identify both universal and region-specific environmental concerns. The research contributes to the field of both digital humanities and literary studies offering new insights into the global dynamics of environmental consciousness.
Presenters
Jackline BallangStudent, Masters Degree, Northern Arizona Univerisity, Arizona, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Ecocriticism, Literary Studies, Computational Tools, Environmental Conscious
