A Text Analysis Of The Australian Aboriginal Novel Benang From The Heart From The Perspective Of Literary Pragmatics

Literary pragmatics,as an interface subject between literature and pragmatics,has attracted scholars' extensive attention at home and abroad since the 1990 s.The study of literary pragmatics involves the author,reader,text,world and other factors,regarding authors and readers as the interactive cognitive subjects and regarding the literature as the speech act,and the text meaning is interpreted on the basis of social function and cultural meaning background.Literary pragmatics includes many theories,such as cooperative principle,politeness principle,relevance theory,cognitive context,etc.Therefore,the emergence of literary pragmatics breaks the separation of literature and pragmatics,provides more research perspectives for the study of literary text analysis,and plays a thrust role in the interpretation of literary text analysis.Since Australian Aboriginal texts have many long-standing oral narrative features,they appear non-liner,illogical and incoherent to many non-Aboriginal readers.Benang is one of the representative works of Australian Aboriginal author,Kim Scott,and since the novel came out,it has aroused great concern in Australian literary world,and Kim Scott has also won many Australian literary awards for this semi-autobiographical novel,such as Miles Franklin Literary Award,etc.The writer of the thesis takes cognitive context,relevance theory and cooperative principle in the field of literary pragmatics as the theoretical frameworks.The writer uses the restriction and explanation of cognitive context,the integration of maximal relevance on time,person,vocative expression and others,and the dynamism of observance and violation of the cooperative principle.The writer also takes conversations and self narrations from Australian Aboriginal work Benang from the Heart(hereinafter referred to as Benang)as the text to analyze the macroscopic framework role of Australian Aboriginal history,culture and cognitive mode in the process of Scott constructing text.The writer discusses the language strategies used by Scott in his constructing the text coherence in the oral text.The writer also discusses the textual strategies used by Scott in revealing the history that Australian Aboriginal people were colonized by the white people,so as to excavate the relationship between author,reader,text and world in the Australian Aboriginal narratives.The research questions are as follows:1.As cognitive contexts,what roles do the Australian Aboriginal history,culture and cognitive mode play when the author constructed the text Benang?2.How did the author construct the coherence of Benang via the maximal relevance from the perspective of literary pragmatics?3.What strategies did Scott use in the conversations between people in Benang to construct the history that the Aboriginal people were colonized by the white people according to cooperative principle of literary pragmatics?It is found in our study that Australian Aboriginal history,culture and cognitive mode are the context basis of Scott constructing the text Benang,and they play a macroscopic framework role in the deep exposition of the situation of Aboriginal people;secondly,readers can,on the basis of understanding author's construction of the text,find the proof of coherence for interpreting nonlinear narrative Benang via the maximal relevance;finally,the observance and violation of the cooperative principle in a series of conversations between people of the text sharply show the history that Australian Aboriginal people were colonized by the white people,and they are also important textual strategies of Scott.In summary,cognitive context,relevance theory and cooperative principle are three important theories of literary pragmatics which can be used to analyze the language strategies and textual strategies used by Scott in constructing the coherence and literature meaning of Benang.The theories in literary pragmatics enable the writer to do the analysis,which helps the readers comprehend profoundly the history that Australian Aboriginal people were colonized by the white people.At the same time,the writer finds that the study on Benang from the perspective of literary pragmatics can form a new theoretical foundation and foothold for the study of other Australian Aboriginal literary works,so that readers can learn about Australian Aboriginal culture and their narratives from more angles and can also find a theory angle and method for the interpretation of other unconventional foreign literary texts.