Olla, obús, olvido: análisis comparativo de léxico en los cuentos de Arturo Barea

Abstract

Arturo Barea is a Spanish author exiled in 1939, mainly known for his narrative trilogy La forja de un rebelde (The Forging of a Rebel). His tales had to wait until 2001 to be published in a single volume, called Cuentos completos (Complete Tales), which groups the stories into three sections: “Cuentos misceláneos” (“Miscellaneous Tales”), “Cuentos de valor y miedo” (“Tales of Courage and Fear”), and “El centro de la pista” (“The Centre of the Ring”). This article is a review of Arturo Barea's tales from a lexical analytical point of view that requires regrouping the texts into a taxonomy of four categories: war tales, city tales, exile tales and futuristic tales. First, distinctiveness analysis is presented as a computerised tool that enables us to apply a comparative analysis to the texts based on their words. This analysis focuses on frequencies for words in a text, in order to characterise it on the basis of objective data, and thus bring to light the author's ultimate motivation in the creative process that leads to conscious or unconscious lexical selection. Lastly, the results of this analysis are presented together with a brief note in order to check the validity of the taxonomy design and the relevance of the analysis.