A Contrastive Study: Stylistic Analysis Of My Place And Coonardoo

As a rising inter-discipline, stylistics combines the traditional linguistics theory organically together with the literary works, namely, to study style in line with modern linguistic theories and methods. Therefore, the development of modern linguistics has given impetus to stylistics expanding in depth; meanwhile, influenced by the research object itself, stylistics learns to widen its own field in the lateral direction constantly after absorbing some classical theories of literature, which makes it cover all aspects of genre studied, such as the letters, periodicals and magazines, the poem and the novel, etc.. So, stylistics is considered as a new subject with strong compatibility and rich vitality.At present, stylistics has been used more frequently in China to study American-European literary works, but for the burgeoning Australian literature, stylistic analysis seems to be extremely rare. Being a family member in world literature, Australian literature (including aboriginal literature) has "glared into" people's visual field gradually with its own brilliant rays, and got more and more people's concerns. People have attempted to understand this rarity from the other side of ocean through their own literature. However, the reviews of Australian literature we read is mostly the literary criticism from subjective impression, namely, to adopt the traditional literary theory to read and assess it, which does not conform to the requirement of the modern world. Modern development demands that we see the world with the scientific attitude and objective norm. For this reason, these two characters have been set in the analysis of literary works.This thesis, from stylistic point of view, tries to compare and contrast two works that describe Australian aboriginals. One is Coonardoo written by Katharine Susannah Prichard, a white woman writer of Australian realism; the other is My Place, an autobiographic novel written by Sally Morgan, an aboriginal woman writer. By analyzing the language features revealed in both works with quantitative and qualitative research approaches, the thesis makes comparative analysis of the style of the two works, mainly focusing on graphology, vocabulary, sentence structure and narrative point of view, etc. based on the modern scientific and technical means—computational analysis software. It tries to indicate the differences scientifically and objectively between white and aboriginal writers on the same topic (aboriginal) with quantized data.Morgan writes as she talks, her writing is altogether a record of the real speech or dialogue. There's nothing particularly wrong in this way of writing, but it means that the writer can not get her writing onto any higher or more artistic level than everyday speech. It also means that her vocabulary is the vocabulary of everyday speech, which is undoubtedly a limitation, because everyday speech is rarely poetic and appealing. Prichard, by contrast, does write poetically. The very fact that she uses an aboriginal word (Coonardoo) as the name of her novel means she's expecting her readers to appreciate the beauties of the aboriginal. Since doing that was, and still is, a challenge to her white readers. She has been demanding that the readers think about their feelings toward aboriginal people, and further, she forces her white readers to realize that they have failed to perceive the qualities of the aboriginal people, consciously or unconsciously. She herself has a poetic and profound passion for the country where her story is set.Sally Morgan only writes simply, because she is not a well-read person, and also, she is an outsider in her own country. Her family is, as we say, in denial. They are reluctant to admit that they are descendents of aboriginals. So Sally does not know who she is for over half of the book. This means that she is not the heir to all that traditions related with the English language. But things are quite different for K. S. Prichard, she has been to London and Europe, she tastes the richness of the culture she has inherited, and becomes a part of it. She is the master of traditional English writing where her way of thinking is appropriate for her subject matter—life on Wytaliba station in Western Australia.What the thesis discusses is those similarities and differences of languages employed to describe or portray the aborigines in the eyes of aboriginal people and white people. The conclusion is drawn through primary quantitative analysis aided with certain qualitative analysis on the basis of comparative study of statistical data of two novels. It not only offers some new statistical evidence to existing analysis and conclusions of related works, but helps to find stylistic similarities between the two writers as well as some new linguistic features between them. In the course of drawing the conclusion, the consulting method is worthwhile to foreign language teaching as well.