The Conversational Strategies In The Dramatic Discourse

The Importance of Being Ernest is the most successful and most popular play by Oscar Wilde, the distinguished figure in British Aestheticism in the nineteenth century. It abounds in wit and humor through Wilde's superb mastery of expression, and at the same time reveals vividly the typical manners of the upper class of the Victorian Age. Indeed, sociological, stylistic, aesthetic, realistic, modernist, postmodernist and postcolonist views all prove to be applicable approaches in interpreting the play for the past century. As one of the most famous comedies, the play enjoyed most revivals for its conversations, or verbal texts. However there were few researches which apply pragma-stylistics to the play, which should be of significance and enlightening.The thesis is divided into seven chapters, with the content of each specified as the follow:In Chapter 1, a brief introduction of Oscar Wilde and his writing style is going to be made first. Then, background, the character the play involves and the techniques employed in The Importance of Being Earnest are to be introduced so as to pave the way for further understanding of it. In addition, the research purpose, methods and significance as well as the structure of this thesis are also mentioned. In Chapter 2, some criticism of The Importance of Being Earnest will be reviewed and checked. In Chapter 3, theoretical preliminaries for the study are to be illustrated: pragma-stylistics, conversation analysis, cooperative principle and politeness principle (CA, CP and PP hence forth). Chapter 4 mainly illustrates Lady Bracknell's power in the conversation by analyzing the turn control, turn taking, turn length and turn type. Chapter 5 explores the light, humorous and witty Wildean language and the hero's irony and satire towards the social phenomenon such as love and marriage, by analyzing the violating and flouting of CP in the conversation between the two male protagonists, Jack and Algernon. Chapter 6, by exploring the following and breaking of PP in the conversation between the two female protagonists, Gwendolen and Cecily, presents us with the image of the new women in the Victorian society and thus reveals the theme of the play. Chapter Seven serves as the summary to the thesis to conclude the significance and application of the pragma-stylistics to drama texts as well as the limitation of the study.The present thesis analyzes the conversational strategies of the dramatic dialogue in The Importance of Being Earnest by Wild, by approaching CA, CP and PP respectively, and verifies that the pragmatic theories are applicable to the analysis of dramatic dialogue which is crucial to the dramatic texts, and that the stylistic effects of dramatic texts are largely achieved through the employment of these pragmatic principles. And in the play, there is no clear distinguish between the truth and the lie, the sincerity and the joke, the significance and the triviality, and one should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality...