A Study Of Attitudinal Resources In The Literary Reviews Of Native Son From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Richard Wright’s major work Native Son protests against the racism and discusses the depressed black’s daily life in America in the 1940 s.The publication of this novel alters the ways in which blacks and whites envision each other.Due to Wright’s insightful social criticism,this novel has been widely discussed by many scholars.This thesis makes a study of attitudinal resources in the literary reviews of Native Son from the perspective of Appraisal Theory which is a functional model of interpersonal meaning studying attitudes at the level of discourse semantics.This theory includes three sub-types: Attitude,Engagement and Graduation.Nowadays,researches guided by Appraisal Theory have been widely conducted from different fields such as casual conversation,media discourse,academic discourse,pedagogical discourse,commercial languages and other language phenomena.Since quite few researches touched the study combining Appraisal Theory and academic dissertations,this thesis made a new attempt in this aspect.It is conducted to answer the following questions:1.What are distributional features of these dissertation authors’ attitudes in these dissertations?2.What attitudes do these dissertation authors have towards the theme,plots,scene,characters and writing features?3.What discourse strategies are employed by the authors in expression?To answer these three questions,this thesis employs Appraisal Theory as the theoretical guidance and explores authors’ attitudes in the selected 15 foreign dissertations about the novel Native Son.The data for the study are dissertations available about Native Son downloaded at random from the website of ProQuest.Taking these dissertations as a corpus,the analysis adopts a quantitative approach to collect data and a qualitative approach to explain corresponding evaluations.The results show that:1.Appreciation Resource is used more than Judgment and Affect Resource and under Appreciation,Value resource is used more than Reaction and Composition.2.Writers often employ strategies like conveying explicit attitudes and quoting multiple voices into their texts.3.In the evaluation of specific aspects such as theme,plots,scene,characters andwriting features,Affect,Judgment and Appreciation resources appears differently in each part.By analyzing these authors’ attitudes,a brief conclusion can be drawn that Native Son is a significant literary work with profound meaning,describing the realistic depressed black life in Chicago.The authentic portrayal of black’s unfair treatment like Bigger impresses literary reviewers and they often sympathize with him.Among these dissertations,the figure discussed frequently is the protagonist Bigger,with few about other characters,especially woman character.Bigger,in most literary reviewers’ eyes,is a bright,acutely sensitive,tragic black youth with aspiration of fulfillment and achievement in the White world,differing from his friends and family members.When it comes to plots and scene,many of these dissertation authors think plots created in this novel are tense,hell-like and creative.In the discussion of writing features of the novel,some authors think Wright employs writing techniques like empathy,irony,metaphor and tragic forms.All these are doomed to the success of Native Son.Overall,this thesis combines Appraisal Theory with academic dissertations together,offering a new angle to read literary reviews of Native Son and conduct a development of application of theoretical framework.Finally,the limitations of the analysis are given,offering advice for further research.