A Comparative Study Of Irony In Small World And Fortress Besieged From The Perspective Of Speech Act Theory

Small World by David Lodge,a famous British writer,and Fortress Besieged by Qian Zhongshu,a famous Chinese writer are all classics.In Fortress Besieged,through the description of Fang Hongjian’s rich and tortuous experience after his return to China,the novel vividly reveals the dilemmas faced by a group of Chinese intellectuals on career and emotional issues,and the spiritual crisis of modern intellectuals in the different cultural atmospheres of China and the West,which indicates that the social psychology of life is a “besieged city”.In Small World,scholars in the novel seem to be busy with academia,but in fact they are all running for fame and fortune.And they fly around the world in search of all kinds of pleasures.The two novels have the similar story clues and thematic ideas,and have some similarities and differences in using irony.It’s natural for Chinese readers to connect the two novels together,since they regard“Small World” as “Fortress Besieged” in the West.Up to now,studies on the two novels have mainly focused on the rhetoric aspects of language such as metaphor,satire or on the themes or characters in the novel and there have been a few comparative studies of the two novels.However,from the perspective of pragmatics,especially from the perspective of speech act theory,there have been relatively few studies on the analysis of the use of irony of the two novels,and no comparative study of them has been conducted so far from the perspective of speech act theory.Based on Austin’s and Searle’s speech act theories and Van Dijk’s ironic speech act theory,this study makes a comparative analysis of the similarities and differences in the use of various types of ironic speech acts in Small World and Fortress Besieged from both macro and micro perspectives.The purpose of this study is to answer two main questions: first,what’s the frequency of the use of irony in Small World and Fortress Besieged respectively? second,what are the similarities and differences between the use of irony in Small World and Fortress Besieged ? In the two selected novels,according to Searle’s and Henk Haverkate’s classification of ironic speech acts in literature,the corpus is marked and counted manually.When marking,each type of ironic speech act in the two novels is marked and counted each time it appears.Finally,through some tables about the occurrence times of various types of ironic speech acts in the two novels are presented,and further verify the feasibility of applying Speech Ac Theory to analyze irony in literary works.The results show that in general,there is no significant difference of overall irony between Small World and Fortress Besieged,although macro irony is used far more than micro irony in two corpora.To be specific,for macro irony,both Qian Zhongshu and Lodge employ more literal ironic speech acts than structural irony.And for micro irony,assertive irony is the most popular one in two works.The frequency of its four subcategories in Fortress Besieged is as follows: assertive irony > expressive irony >directive irony >commissive irony,while in Small World: assertive irony >expressive irony > commissive irony > directive irony.By analyzing these two corpora,Lodge doesn’t use any directive ironic speech acts in Small World but Qian Zhongshu uses some in Fortress Besieged.Finally,we find that the two authors have different styles of irony language because of their different times.The language is more sharp,bitter and thorough in using irony in Fortress Besieged while in Small World it tends to be cheerful and relaxed.This study provides a new perspective for the study on the Small World and Fortress Besieged.It also enriches and expands the application of Speech Act Theory in literary works by analyzing the use of irony in the two corpora.It is proved that in the author’s language and the characteristics of the novel,all kinds of ironic speech acts can be explained in detail in this theoretical framework.In addition,exploring the relationship between speech act theory and irony is of great significance to the analysis and understanding of other novels and literary works.