Purpose
The goal of the project is to analyze the
verbiage of “Lysistrata” in order to identify and justify the two most significant agons (struggles)
that we have previously discussed in class.
Hypothesis
The most significant agons that we are
hoping to identify are: Athenians v. Spartans and men v. women.
These agons are thought to be the central themes of the play.
Project
Description
In order to justify the result of our
discussion in class, this project aims to analyze Aristophanes word usage in
hopes to identify the two most significant agons (power struggles) throughout
the play. Subsequently, our research will 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. We will also categorize the words into
nouns, adjectives, verbs (as suggested by Alice) for better clarification. The
results will be presented in the format of a graph of words vs. frequency.
Preliminary
results/discussion
Based on our recent findings and
discussion, we found that certain words that are strongly related to the
central agons hypothesized did not appear as frequently as we thought it would
have. For example, the word wife/wives
only appeared 11 times and the word husband
also only appeared 11 times throughout the entire text. The word justice only appeared once and the word duty only appeared 3 times. On the other
hand, words such as love appeared as
many as 23 times, need 10 times, as
well as want 16 times. We also
discovered that the names of ancient Greek deities were mentioned repeatedly by
the characters (Zues:15 times, Aphrodite:8 times,Artemis:7 times).
We will continue to search for words and
analyze the context of the words. Based on our findings, we hope that this
project will help to justify the hypothesis if not suggest other important
agons that we might have overlooked in class.
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