The 20th Century World of Mo Yan: A Corpus-Based Approach

The 2012 winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, Mo Yan, employs literary techniques characterized by the return of realism, urban literature, and the popularization of avant-garde literary styles. He has been recognized as an important figure in contemporary Chinese literature. This paper examined the language in Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. Analysis of the language used in the novel, as it fits into the modern Chinese literary tradition, was conducted using the AntConc software for corpus analysis that calculates the frequency of the words used, how they are used, as compared to the corpus of contemporary English. The rest of the paper was focused on the methodology used in the analysis of the works of Mo Yan and how this particular method helped in analyzing the language used in the novels