Critical Analysis Of The Intertextuality Of Womanism In The Color Purple

Alice Walker is one of the most prominent Arifican-American female writers who devotes her life to the racial equality and emancipation of black women.In 1982,she published The Color Purple,which won her both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for Fiction.She,therefore,became the first black female writer who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in America.For distinguishing herself from Feminism,she creates“Womanism” to refer to an universalist ideology for all women to resist all oppression and inequality faced by them.Womanism is mainly based on black women's experiences but not so much hostile to men as Feminism is.Walker then generalizes four features of her Womanism,which includes Anti-sexism,Anti-racism,Afro-centric and Humanism.If Womanism is seen as an ideology,then,The Color Purple,is the perfect practice of it.Intertextuality is one of text theories in literature which stresses the meaning of a text is constructed by its interactive relations to other texts.In 1992,Fairclough introduced intertextuality to Critical Discourse Analysis,which not only expanded the research domain of literary intertextuality,but also made it become one of the most important concepts in the study of the relationship between language and ideology.In discourse analysis,critical linguists not only emphasize the influence of the interactive relations between texts on the meaning of discourse,but also highlight the importance of the context to the construction of the textual meaning.For them,all contexts,including sociocultural,political and historical,are all seen as the intertexts to exert influence on the interpretation of a discourse.Taking The Color Purple as its target text,this thesis,from a perspective of CDA,aims at exploring the Womanism ideology by using the theory of intertextuality.Based on Fairclough's Three-dimension Model,this thesis tries to approach Systemic Functional Grammar together with Corpus to conduct a quantitative and qualitative intertextual analysis of Womanism ideology.In the micro-level of language,the study analyzes clausal transitivity and modality of the text to explore what ideological effects will be achieved by the intra-intertextuality.While,at the macro-level of context,it probes into the register,genre and sociocultural context of the novel,whose aim is at digging out the extra-intertextual relations between the novel and its Womanism ideology.In order to have a systemic analysis,four steps are taken: 1)describing the intertextual features of the text;2)interpreting the discoursal functions of these intertextual features;3)explaining the intertextual relations between the text and its Womanism ideology;4)uncovering the intertextual construction ofWomanism in the novel.The results show that at its language level,the text of the novel and Womanism form a relationship of Material-and Structural intertextuality,which were realized by the clausal transitivity and modality.While at the macro-level,Womanism is in a dynamic intertextual relation to the context of the novel.They are establishing Interpersonal-,Generic and Cultural intertextuality.From these results,this study proves that critical intertextuality can be seen as an effective way for linguists to study the relationship between language and ideology of a literary work because it not only covers a micro-description of language,but also includes the contextual interpretation of the text.At the end,this thesis puts forward a framework of conducting a critical intertextual analysis of discourse,with a hope that it can contribute some value to other critical researches in this field.