A Functional Stylistic Research Of Realism And Stream-of-Consciousness Stories

Both Realistic stories and Stream-of-Consciousness stories belong to prose,but they have different narrative styles.The former focus on truthfully reflecting real life and achieving the purpose of criticizing reality while the latter focus on direct narrating to reflect the free flow of people's consciousness.Therefore,the two genres may show some stylistic differences.This study makes a comparison of the stylistic features of these two genres from the aspects of experiential metafunction and projection and explains the stylistic features of each genre.This study combines qualitative and quantitative methods.At first,four realistic short stories and stream-of-consciousness short stories are selected as the representative of the two genres,and all texts are annotated manually according to the theoretical framework of systemic functional grammar.Then Excel and SPSS will be used to process the data.Finally,the data are analyzed by comparison and the prominent differences are explained by referring to contextual factors.It is found that,in terms of experiential metafunction,the percentage of verbal process of realistic stories is significantly higher than that of stream-of-consciousness stories,and the percentage of mental process is significantly lower than that of stream-of-consciousness stories.What's more,there are also significant differences in the types of specific processes:verbal and mental processes.In terms of projection types,direct speech,indirect speech,and narrative report of speech act are more commonly used in realistic stories while free direct speech and free indirect speech are more likely to be used in stream-of-consciousness stories.Idea-projection is more common in stream-of-consciousness stories on the whole,with free direct thought and free indirect thought as the top two types adopted.The conclusion is that the significant differences between the two genres are mainly related to their generic features,and that the authors make stylistic choices in keeping with these features.It is hoped that this study will introduce a new perspective to the stylistic study of realistic and stream-of-consciousness stories,and demonstrate the applicability of functional stylistics in explaining the stylistic features of literary texts at large.