From Cohesion To Coherence:A Stylistic Analysis Of James Joyce's "Penelope"

James Joyce's stream-of-consciousness fiction Ulysses represents the maturity of the experimental modernist novel.Its last episode “Penelope”,consisting of eight paragraphs with only two full stops,is one of the most difficult parts in the novel and known as the first “longest sentence in English literature”.Predominate critical readings of this episode tend to focus on how Joyce simulates the spontaneous flow of the protagonist's consciousness;meanwhile,linguistics,discourse analysis or stylistics has paid little attention to this kind of special text.This dissertation adopts a stylistic perspective,on the basis of Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar,to examine the complicated logico-semantic relations in this episode,visualizing its multi-layered discourse structure and narrative structure behind the linear progression of the text.This dissertation first examines the intricate and often implicit logico-semantic relations between clauses and clause complexes in “Penelope”,analyzing its local and global cohesion and coherence,with the aim of revealing textual patterns in its multi-layered discourse structure.Second,it examines the uses of “and”,which is the most used connective in “Penelope”,further analyzing the multiplicity of logico-semantic relations and the hierarchical discourse structure beneath the continuous juxtaposition of clauses in the text,with the aim of revealing the stylistic features of stream-of-consciousness fiction.Third,it combines Labov's model of oral narration of personal experience and Stanzel's conceptualization of dual focalization in first-person novel to examine the mode of plot progression through the form of episodic memories and the narrative functions of the narrating self and the experiencing self,thereby analyzing the construction of the multi-layered narrative structure in “Penelope”.Through the multi-dimensional analyses,this study has explained the underlying structure and overall coherence in “Penelope”,revealing the consistency between the linear textual progression and the naturalistic flow of the protagonist's consciousness,and foregrounding the narrative technique of interior monologue in stream-of-consciousness fiction.This study can make contributions in three ways:(1)by using Systemic Functional Grammar to analyze and interpret a radically experimental text,it demonstrates the strong descriptive and explanatory power of Systemic Functional Grammar while enriching the studies of discourse analysis and stylistics;(2)it reveals the complicated discourse structure and narrative structure in “Penelope”,enriching the interpretation of the narrative art in stream-of-consciousness fiction;(3)it helps clarify some commonly held misunderstandings concerning the readings of “Penelope”,enriching studies on interior monologue and opening up new avenues in Ulysses studies and Joycean criticism.