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Exploring Pornography in Widad Benmoussa’s Poetry Using LIWC and Corpus Tools

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Abstract

Literary analysis has been lately ushered towards objective, rather than subjective, interpretation using psycholinguistic principles and computational tools. This manuscript explores pornographic content in Widad Benmoussa’s poetry using Linguistic Query and Word Count (LIWC) and corpus tools. Using LIWC and corpus tools, Benmoussa’s poems were compiled into a UTF-8 encoded file to be processed later by LIWC-2015, Sketch Engine® and AntConc®. Analysis demonstrates that Benmoussa uses sexuality as a central metaphor throughout her poems to express her aspiration to restore and concretize the lost romantic love. The pornographic words, although less explicitly stated, speak of the profound sexual desire.

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Notes

  1. The supplemental files are provided in two formats:.pdf and.dic. The.dic file is LIWC- readable but the.pdf file is only uploaded online for viewing.

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Correspondence to Encarnación Sánchez Arenas.

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Electronic supplementary material

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Supplementary material 1 (DIC 13 kb)

Supplementary material 2 (PDF 262 kb)

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 3.

Table 3 LIWC’s categorization of Benmoussa’s 6 subcorpora

Appendix 2

See Table 4.

Table 4 LIWC’s categorization of Benmoussa’s subcorpus (I hardly lost my narcissism)

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Arenas, E.S. Exploring Pornography in Widad Benmoussa’s Poetry Using LIWC and Corpus Tools. Sexuality & Culture 22, 1094–1111 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-018-9513-7

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