Abstract
In her remarkable 1861 book,The Woman of the Future, Concepción Arenal appropriated legal discourse, a wholly male domain, to plead the case for women's rights, in particular, education. Two different types of legal discourse emerge in her writing: that of written legislative law and that of courtroom advocacy. The computer can gather evidence of both; however, each mode of discourse requires different measures to weigh the significance of the findings. Easily obtainable repeat rates serve as an useful measure that can be related to what recognition psychologists call “retention intervals” and that are easily understood by non-statistically oriented literary scholars. Analysis focuses on Arenal's use of typography, lexicon, repetition, ideological challenge, interactive discourse, and prescriptive speech acts of the legal register to advocate the cause of women in nineteenth-century Spain.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Arenal de García Carrasco, Concepción.Ensayo sobre el derecho de gentes. Madrid: V. Suarez, 1895.
Arenal de García Carrasco, Concepción.La mujer del porvenir. InLa emancipación de la mujer en España. Ed. Mauro Armiño. Madrid: Jucar, 1974, pp. 97–188.
Arenal de García Carrasco, Concepción. “Spain”.The Woman Question in Europe. Ed. and trans. Theodore Stanton. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1884, pp. 330–53.
Brown, John. “An Analysis of Recognition and Recall and of Problems in Their Comparison”. InRecall and Recognition. Ed. John Brown. London: John Wiley, 1976, pp. 1–36.
Brown, John, ed.Recall and Recognition. London: John Wiley, 1976.
Campo Alange, Condesade.Concepción Arenal en el origen de unos cambios sociales. Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española. 1975.
Castellanos, Rosario.Mujer que sabe latín. México, D. F.: Secretaría de Educación Pública (SepSetentas), 1973, pp. 7–46.
García Hoz, Víctor.Vocabulario usual, vocabulario común y vocabulario fundamental. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas Instituto “San José de Calasanz”, 1953.
Gibbons, John, ed.Language and the Law. London: Longman, 1994.
Gibbons, John. “Introduction: Language Constructing Law”. In Gibbons,Language and the Law, pp. 3–10.
Gibbons, John. “Introduction: Language and Disadvantage before the Law”. In Gibbons,Language and the Law, pp. 195–98.
Goldfield, Joel. “An Argument for Single-Author and Similar Studies Using Quantitative Methods: Is There Safety in Numbers?”Computers and the Humanities, 27, 5–6 (1993–94), 365–74.
Harris, Sandra. “Ideological Exchanges in British Magistrates Courts”. In Gibbons,Language and the Law, pp. 156–70.
Irizarry, Estelle. “Concepción Arenal (1820–1893)”. InSpanish Women Writers. Eds. Linda Gould Levine, Ellen Engelson Marson, and Gloria Waldman. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993, pp. 44–53.
Irizarry, Estelle. “A Computer-Assisted Investigation of Gender-Related Idiolect in Octavio Paz and Rosario Castellanos”.Computers and the Humanities, 26, 2 (1992), 103–17.
Joeres, Ruth-Ellen Boetcher. “The Passionate Essay: Radical Feminist Essayists”. In Joeres and Mittman,The Politics of the Essay, pp. 51–71.
Joeres, Ruth-Ellen Boetcher and Elizabeth Mittman. “An Introductory Essay”. InThe Politics of the Essay: Feminist Perspectives. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993, pp. 12–20.
Johnstone, Barbara et al.Repetition in Discourse: Disciplinary Perspectives. Ed. Barbara Johnstone. Vol. 1. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1994. 2 vols.
Juilland, Alphonse and E. Chang-Rodríguez.Frequency Dictionary of Spanish Words. The Hague: Mouton, 1964.
Lockhart, Robert S., Fergus I. M. Craik and Larry Jacoby. “Depth of Processing, Recognition and Recall”. In Brown,Recall and Recognition, pp. 75–102.
Maley, Yon. “The Language of the Law”. In Gibbons,Language and the Law. London: Longman, 1994, pp. 11–50
Mellinkoff, David.The Language of the Law. Boston: Little, Brown, 1963.
Merritt, Marilyn. “Repetition in Situated Discourse — Exploring Its Forms and Functions in Situated Discourse”. In Johnstone,Repetition in Discourse, pp. 23–36.
MicroConcord. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Computer Software.Manual by Simon Murison-Bowie.
Miguel, Jesús M. de and Melissa G. Moyer.Sociology in Spain. Current Sociology, 27, 1 (1979). Special issue.
Mill, John Stuart.The Subjection of Women. Cambridge: M.I.T., 1970.
Moneva y Puyol, Juan.Introducción al derecho hispánico. 3rd ed. Barcelona: Labor, 1942.
MTAS. Ian Lancashire and Lidio Presutti. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1988. Computer Software.
Muller, Charles.Estadística Lingüística. Madrid: Gredos, 1973.
Pániker, Salvador. “El debate sobre la eutanasia”.Anthropos, 157 (1994), 90.
Potter, Rosanne. “From Literary Output to Literary Criticism: Discovering Shaw's Rhetoric”.Computers and the Humanities, 25, 4–5 (1989), 333–40.
Rojas, Lourdes and Nancy Saporta Sternbach. “Latin American Essayists: ‘Intruders and Usurpers.’” In Joeres and Mittman,The Politics of the Essay, pp. 172–95.
Rodríguez-Bou, Ismael.Recuento de vocabulario español. Vol. 1. Río Piedras, PR: University of Puerto Rico, 1952.
Sagrada Biblia. Eloíno Nácar Fuster and Alberto Colunga. Madrid: Bibioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1969.
Snyder, John.Prospects of Power. Tragedy, Satire, the Essay, and the Theory of Genre. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991.
Thompson, John B.Studies in the Theory of Ideology. Oxford: Polity Press, 1984.
WordCruncher. American Forks, UT: Johnston & Co., 1992. Computer Software.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
Estelle Irizarry, Professor of Spanish at Georgetown University, is the author of twenty-one books on Hispanic literature. She is the editor ofHispania.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Irizarry, E. Weighing the evidence: Legal discourse in the 19th-Century Spanish feminist Concepción Arenal. Comput Hum 29, 363–374 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02279527
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02279527