Irony Analysis In Lord Of The Flies-Based On Speech Act Theory

Speech Act Theory is one of the most important theories in pragmatic field. It has gone through nearly half a century since 1950 s. Austin first proposed the theory in a series of lectures of How to Do Things with Words in 1962 and classified it into locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act. After that, as a student of Austin, Searle did further researches on Speech Act Theory according to Austin’s principle. He not only distributed the theory into assertive speech act, directive speech act, commisive speech act, expressive speech act and declarative speech act, but also proposed indirect speech act. The formation of this theoretical system has enormous facilitation in the development of pragmatics. In recent years, this theory has been increasingly used in the study of literary texts, thus emerges a new interdiscipline-Literary Pragmatics, which provides a new perspective for the study of the relationship among readers, author and text.Irony is the most outstanding characteristic in Lord of the Flies. However, in literary studies, previous scholars only focused on William Golding or the ideological and literary level of his works. Few scholars analyzed his ironic language from the perspective of pragmatics.This thesis intends to make a detailed analysis of the dominant feature-irony in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, taking Speech Act Theory as its theoretical basis. This thesis elaborates the connection between irony and Speech Act Theory, reviews literary criticism on William Golding’s irony in Lord of the Flies, and analyzes the conversations of the characters from both macro and micro aspect in Lord of the Flies taking ironic conversations between characters and conflicting descriptions among plots in the novel as corpus.In the light of the studies mentioned above, this thesis makes a case study on irony in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies on the basis of Austin and Searle’s Speech Act Theory, to affirm the feasibility of applying pragmatic theories, especially Speech Act Theory, in literary studies.