The Contemporary Epistolary Novella and the Lure of Collage and Intertextuality: A Computational Reading of Ernest Veyu and Daisy Barro's Also on Campus

Abstract

This study reads Ernest Veyu and Daisy Barro’s Also on Campus (2021) as a postmodern epistolary novella built on two central literary strategies: intertextuality and collage. Intertextuality refers to the way any text is shaped by, and in conversation with, other texts that came before it. Collage, borrowed from the visual arts, describes the technique of assembling a work from fragments drawn from different sources, genres, and registers so that their combination produces a new and richer meaning. The paper examines the novella through three theoretical lenses: Julia Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality, Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism, and Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response theory. These are supported by computational text analysis in which Voyant and AntConc Tools are applied. A corpus of 28,340 words (including metadata) and 4,261 unique word forms yields frequency and concordance data that confirms what close reading reveals: that Also on Campus is a carefully layered literary work that uses the form of the epistolary novella as a site of cultural and political argument, addressing questions of gender, power, language, and identity in a contemporary African university setting. A particularly striking computational finding is that the word love appears 71 times in the corpus against wife’s 21, a ratio of 3.4 to 1 that maps the novella’s deepest emotional argument in plain statistical terms.