The influence of freudist philosophy on the concept of loneliness in English modernist literature

Abstract

The research prerequisites are predicated on the actualization of the Freudian paradigm within contemporary humanities scholarship and the growing interest in the digital hermeneutics of literature. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of Freudian philosophy on the artistic portrayal of loneliness in English modernist literature, while considering the methodologies of digital humanities. The investigation employed a mixed-methods approach, encompassing thematic analysis, content analysis, tf-idf calculations, lexemes clustering, and correlation analysis. Statistical processing was conducted within the RStudio environment (version 4.3.1). The selection comprised six seminal novels: “Mrs. Dalloway”, “To the Lighthouse”, “The Waves”, “Ulysses”, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, and “The Sound and the Fury”. The highest total frequency of Freudian terminology was recorded in “Ulysses” (76 instances), while the lowest was noted in “To the Lighthouse” (46). Markers of loneliness were most prevalently identified in “Ulysses” (38) and “The Sound and the Fury” (35). The tf-idf analysis illuminated the localized significance of the lexemes “ego”, “unconscious”, and “narcissism”, contingent upon the respective texts. Correlation analysis substantiated the presence of a stable positive correlation between Freudian terminology and loneliness markers (r = 0.74). The study unveiled the systemic presence of psychoanalytic structures within the narrative framing of loneliness in English-speaking modernism. Freudian concepts operate as semantic cells that encapsulate the internal states of characters. Further research could delve into a broader corpus of 20th-century English-language literature and apply multimodal models to elucidate uncover unconscious structures.