THE COMPUTER IN LITERARY ANALYSIS - USING TACT WITH STUDENTS

TACT, a freeware program from the University of Toronto's Centre for C omputing in the Humanities, is a highly sophisticated tool for text re trieval; although written for experienced critics and researchers, it can teach undergraduate students to read literature in new, fresh ways . Without requiring that the user become either a programmer, linguist , mathematician, or statistician, TACT introduces the literature stude nt to the computer as a research tool. Studies of imagery and symbolis m, of structural patterns, and of prosody can result from the student' s careful tagging of a literary text and can yield significant insight s into the work of literature. Students who use the computer as such a tool learn to read literary texts more closely and to think more clea rly about literary problems.