Personal Tragedy Under The Shadow Of Discourse

As a new field in applied linguistics, discourse analysis has witnessed considerable growth of interest in the past century. And it has now been recognized that literary texts are perhaps the most important and powerful language data among all types of discourse data. But there exist many problems in analyzing the literary discourse, so it will be a long way to go to do research on literary discourse analysis. This paper uses Death of a Salesman as a discourse text to analyze, building a bridge between discourse analysis and a particular genre of literature, i.e., drama.This paper first reviews the phenomenal achievements of Death of a Salesman since its birth. And then I'll try to apply James Paul Gee and Norman Fairclough's discourse theories in my analysis of Willy Loman as a tragic hero. Gee argues that what we speak and what we write is to build tasks; Fairclough connects discourse and society from the perspective of text, discursive practice and social practice, i.e. the three-dimensional conception of discourse. This paper explores the tragedy of Willy Loman from different perspectives on the basis of these two theories.Willy Loman is a tragic hero without any doubt. However, if we consider the effects of discourse, we find that Willy's tragedy is also attributed to the social force of discourse. Willy struggles for his dream of being a success; he even dies for that. He is a tragic hero, one who fights to his end. He is deeply affected by the Discourse of American Dream and finally loses his social identity. Meanwhile, his conception constantly affects people around him. Eventually, his unpractical ideal ruins him and his family. Only after we know how discourse works on individual lives can we better understand Willy's personal tragedy and learn how to cope with our problems in the society full of discourse of "power" and "otherness".