Food Making in Fiction as a Way to Self-fulfillment: A Corpus-assisted Study

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Department of Basic Sciences, Applied College, Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Department of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Education, Tanta University, Tanta, Egypt

Abstract

This paper uses two analytical procedures, i.e., corpus-based and manual, to analyse the motif of food and food-making in Julie Powell’s (2005) memoir Julie and Julia 365 days 524 recipes 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, and two novels, namely, Jeanne Ray’s (2003) Eat Cake and Judith R Hendrick’s (2001) Bread Alone. In these works, food and food-making can be seen as a tool for portraying the characters’ situations, feelings, and possibilities in life. The act of cooking does not only have a tangible representation but a symbolic metaphorical level where it is associated with depression, fear, pleasure and desire for self-fulfillment. Each protagonist – Julie in Powell’s memoir, Wynter in Bread Alone and Ruth in Eat Cake – goes through a redemptive journey to find meaning in her life. This paper attempts to explore the ways in which corpus linguistics can enrich traditional literary analysis. The three texts are manually examined to explore their major literary themes. The corpus-based analysis involved using the software tool, WMatrix5, to extract the keywords and the semantic fields in each text. The keywords and the semantic fields are examined and those relating to food and the food making process are identified. The evaluation of the results of both the corpus-based and manual analyses attests to the effectiveness of corpus linguistics in underpinning manual literary analysis.

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References

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