How Were Dubliners Paralyzed By Joyce

Dubliners, the first novel written by James Joyce, is known both as an excellent collection of short stories and as a precursor of his later works. Being one of the most distinguished literary innovators in the twentieth century, Joyce is best renowned for his technical daring. Though Dubliners is somewhat conventional, it displays the early try of Joyce's creativity, which is a great contribution to the short story genre. The present thesis is a study of the collection from the functional stylistic perspective.Emphasizing both the relationship within the linguistic system and the interrelationship between the linguistic system and the outside world, functional linguistics is now regarded as one of the most effective tools used in the analysis of literary work. So there appears the quick development of functional stylistics. The present thesis testifies the theme of Dubliners by a functional stylistic analysis of its language. The first chapter of the thesis briefly introduces James Joyce and his work, Dubliners. The second chapter gives the theoretical background of the thesis. The author uses Halliday's theory of meta-functions, mainly the textual and experiential function. The specific analyzing tools used are repetition and transitivity analysis.In the third chapter, the implications of formal repetitions and symbolic repetitions are discussed. Transitivity analysis is also employed in the analysis of two of the characters. From the formal structural level, the author makes a comparison of the rate of material and non-material processes. Differences in transitivity manifest the degree of activeness of persons involved in the processes. In the collection, the employment of repetition and the selected use of process types form what Halliday called foregrounding. According to Leech,foregrounding deserves readers' attention and needs to be explained (Leech, G N., 2001: 67). By interpreting the meaning conveyed by the foregrounding, the author explains how it is considered to be helpful, in helping Joyce to disclose the paralysis of his fellow countrymen and in helping his readers to understand the paralysis theme of the collection. Besides, based on transitivity analysis, the author points out that, causative verbs, which may help to show the activeness of characters, are rarely used in Joyce's description of Dubliners. The infrequent use of such words further testifies the paralysis and ineffectiveness of Dubliners.By using functional stylistics, the thesis further demonstrates the theme of Dubliners from the stylistic point of view. At the same time, it approves the usefulness of functional stylistics in criticizing novels.