A Study On The Performativity Of Speech Acts In De Mortuis

De Mortuis is one of John Collier’s famous suspense novels that portrays a murder generated by character conversations.Scholars have studied Collier and his works mainly in terms of the plot,the theme,the suspense,and the symbolic representations.Little attention has been paid to the conversations.Therefore,this thesis uses John Searle and Hillis Miller’s speech acts theory in combination to analyze the performativity of speech acts in De Mortuis.The methods mainly involve close reading,case study,and qualitative analysis.Guided by Searle’s theory,the speech acts of the novel’s characters are analyzed to reveal the complex relationships thus explaining the storyline development.Under the guidance of Hillis Miller’s theory,the entire work is viewed as the author’s speech act,and its narrative power is studied.It is found that the author introduces the reader to the fascinating world of speech and satirizes social issues by imitating,reconstructing,and satirizing the real world.By examining the film and television adaptations of De Mortuis from the perspective of readers’ response,it is found that Charles’ radio program focuses on the mechanism of the characters’ speech acts,while Hitchcock’s film version focuses more on the consequences of the speech acts.Therefore,as a literary text,De Mortuis evokes different responses,which urge both the readers and authors to think of their responsibility,suggesting to some extent that the narrative force of literary texts is more subtle and complex.This thesis substantiated the feasibility of the application of literary speech acts theory,which could be a useful reference for certain types of literary studies in the future and also provide a new perspective on interpreting literary works.This thesis also verified that literary speech acts or “fictive acts” could turn into acts that produced the real effect.In this way,literary speech act as a crucial component in human language,is constructing and influencing both the novel itself and the world it is in,which shows the performativity of literary text and signifies the importance of the study on it.