PICTURES OF THE DECADENCE IN WORDS – REMEMBER AND THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY – A CORPUS LINGUISTIC APPROACH
PICTURES OF THE DECADENCE IN WORDS – REMEMBER AND THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY – A CORPUS LINGUISTIC APPROACH

Summary/Abstract: The current research paper aims to establish the frequencies of terms belonging to the semantic fields of senses, arts, physical appearance and beauty, colours and illness in two works representative of the Decadent movement in the English and Romanian literature, i.e. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Mateiu Caragiale’s Remember. A comparative approach of the authors’ intentions to picture their worlds is performed to reveal similarities and differences between the literary works under scrutiny and how they are relevant for the literary movement, studying them solely from a linguistic perspective. The methods chosen to perform the study belong to corpus linguistics, i.e. an online available software programme named Word Counter is used to detect the number of occurrences, followed by the interpretation stage using charts. Results prove that the words from the semantic field of physical appearance have the highest frequency in both works, senses and colours are significant aspects in the works under scrutiny, illness is not stressed in both stories, and art is more important in The Picture of Dorian Gray than in Remember. The occurrences of the terms reveal similarities and differences which validate the statement that the texts belonging to a certain literary period, i.e. the Decadence, focus on the physical appearance, beauty and art, values promoted by the literary movement.

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