We will analyze the verbiage of “Lysistrata” for our final integration/application project. By analyzing Aristophanes word usage, we hope to identify the two most significant agons (power struggles) throughout the play, as well as provide analysis of the relationships between the characters who mention these specific words whilst highlighting the central themes of “Lysistrata.” We are going to analyze words whose usage may point to a diagnosis of society by the context in which they are used. The most significant agons that we are hoping to identify are: Athenians v. Spartans and men v. women. We will identify these agons by analyzing and counting certain words; although we do not have a concrete list of words to use for this survey, here are some key words we believe will provide us with a strong foundation: woman/women, man/men, Greece, Athens/Athenians, Sparta/Spartans, wife/wives, husband(s), Peloponnesian, war, peace, celibate/celibacy, responsibility, sacrifice, love, seize, deny, shout, yell, exclaim, duty, cause, and justice.
Since this work is significantly older than the other texts we read for class, we felt that a textual analysis of this play could be particularly beneficial. By providing audiences (our peers) with a textual analysis of “Lysistrata,” we hope to improve the general comprehension of the play as well as the socio-political atmosphere of Ancient Greece. We have obtained an HTML/PDF format so that we can run it through a word counter/OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program. Once we have a complete list of words and phrases, we will count how many times they are mentioned throughout the text using the OCR software. When we have compiled this information we will identify what the most prominent agons are by analyzing who said the most frequent terms and in what context they were said. If the agons are contrary to our hypothesized agons, we will discuss this data on our tri-fold presentation.
Ah this is something I would have never came up with, but do agree with you in its beneficial qualities. Lysistrata was one of my favorite plays, so I look forward to seeing how the messages the play portrays comes through in word count versus the original shallow understanding that I have now!
ReplyDeleteI think that looking at the words that are used with the ones you have listed will provide a lot of information about the agons.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like an awesome idea. I'm can't wait to see the results and how many times a word was used throughout the play.
ReplyDeleteI also can't wait to see what your results bring back. For the words you chose, perhaps you could divide it into sections: nouns, verbs, adjectives, phrases, sentences that are used often. (I looked it up from the textual analysis we saw in class of the Hunger Games vs Twilight vs Harry Potter by Ben Blatt.)
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