Tai Xiang's Random Projects

The bildungsroman or coming-of-age story is a fairly common archetype in literature. Our ragtag protagonist starts off as a young and inexperienced figure that is not entirely fit for the grueling outside world. Through a series of trials and tribulations, they rise to the occasion and grow as a character, rounding off a fairly linear arc of character development. A couple notable works that follow this archetype that were all required readings in the American education system are To Kill a Mockingbird (your lovely state might have banned this one), The Outsiders, and The Catcher in the Rye (why do they like to ban these so much).

The structures seems pretty simple. You’ve got yourself a character that’s a bit rough around the edges: maybe they’re isolated from the real world and unsure of themselves, maybe they’ve moved to a new place and are forced to start a new life. Regardless of the manner in which the bildungsroman is executed, the arc of the character seems to run in a similar manner.

However, is this development a simply linear line with a positive slope, or is there more to the equation? I plan on aggregating a large amount of literary works classified as bildungsromans and performing a series of analysis on them.

The first one I plan on attempting is emotional analysis: it is similar to sentiment analysis, but instead of being a purely binary split between positive and negative, emotional analysis yields classification of emotions such as fear, happiness, and anger. This metric could yield a quantitative view of the change in emotion throughout the work. Does it become happier or sadder? Is there some sort of decrease in the metric of fear? We shall see I guess.

The issue with emotional analysis however, is that it is fairly new and not the most accurate thing in the world presently. Not to worry though, we have a backup plan. If this whole emotional analysis thing goes wrong, we can always run back to our good friend sentiment analysis. Utilizing sentiment analysis, we can compare the relative polarity through incremented sections of a work: say every 5 pages or so. Comparing these sentiments, we can see if there is an increase, decrease, or no rhythm at all.

Let’s see where this one goes.