Often times, there is a major emphasis placed on the
ideological differences between Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. In some
respects, the tendency to highlight their differences overshadows their
similarities. Besides, perhaps their writings have more in common than accounts
of the differences imply.
I recently decided to focus on what the writers had in
common specifically concentrating on how they used language in their short
stories. To aid in my investigation, I used the text-mining program Voyant to
analyze Hurston’s “Sweat” (1926) and Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home” (1938).
Voyant is a free text analysis program that allows its users to sift through
digitized texts and pinpoint similarities and differences among a number of
texts.
