James Joyce’s Dublin and Park Taewon’s Kyungseong: Sentiment Analysis and the Representation of Colonial Urban Space

This study employs sentiment analysis, a digital humanities methodology, to visualize the emotional trajectories within James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and Park Taewon's A Day in the Life of Kubo, the Novelist (1934). It analyzes how Ireland and Chosun are configured in the two modern colonial cities of Dublin and Kyungseong. Initially, using the Syuzhet R package, emotional curves evolving with the progression of the narrative in both novels were extracted. By conducting comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analyses centered around the inflection points of the graphs, this research compared the emotional structures manifested in these narratives to elucidate the historical and cultural significance of modern urban spaces. In both works, the urban spaces function not only as mere stages for the novels but also as crucial material elements influencing the emotional shifts of the inhabitants living in the colonial era and shaping the narrative structure. More than merely enchanting the crowds with new cultures, these cities are spaces that doubly alienate individuals under imperialism and capitalism. Understanding the flow of emotions of the characters becomes closely related to grasping the perception of these two texts as spaces of colonization, both in terms of nationality and as spaces within the context of modernization.