THE MULTIDIMENSIONAL CONCORDANCE - A NEW TOOL FOR LITERARY RESEARCH

This paper describes the use of correspondence analysis to create the ''space'' of a book, constructs that of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembli ng as an illustration, and distinguishes three separate contexts of so me of its most important words: the spatial context (where the search word lies in that named and ordered space); the overall context (the x words closest to the search word in multi-dimensional space); and the ''role/sense'' context (the words associated with the search word in each of its most important roles, some of which may represent new sens es.) It describes the identification of these contexts, discusses thei r importance and concludes by noting certain respects in which the pro cedure might perhaps be improved.