Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent : les correspondances à l’ère du numérique

Abstract

The emergence of the digital humanities has been so remarkable in these last years that it has led to the definition of new epistemological stances in the literary field. Nevertheless, the mere recurring presence of a linguistic item in a corpus does not necessarily relate to the semantics of the literary text, given that the text constitutes its own con-text and that its stylistic features play a fundamental role in the construction of meaning. Although the use of digital instruments gives astounding advantages to the researcher, its scope should be the object of further reflections aimed at exploring its real potential. The new epistemological approach that I propose to adopt in this study constitutes an attempt to integrate the analytical depth of a traditional literary perspective and the most advanced digital instruments. Once the choice of the literary corpus is motivated (Ch. Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal and Petits poèmes en prose) and a general topic orienting our research is established (the five senses), I will adopt the following method: I will make a preliminary selection of the relevant elements in the text and, at that point, I will establish the parameters of the analysis and the hypertextual links; after that, all the collected data will be elaborated by a software for exploratory analysis of semantic categories based on graph analytics, which allows for dynamic and relational treatment of the information.
The objective is to show the hypertextual configuration of Baudelaire’s language: not only is it hypertextual in linguistic terms, but also in the perspective of IT. This particular feature of his “correspondances”, which structure his writing style, invites to further investigation through the use of new digital tools and offers a stunning example of the possible synergy between literary criticism and IT.