O’Halloran, K.A (2007) ‘The subconscious in James Joyce’s ‘Eveline’: a corpus stylistic analysis which chews on the ‘Fish hook’’, Language and Literature 16 (3): 227-244. (original) (raw)

Transitivity, paradigmatic choices, and thought presentation: A stylistic analysis of Joyce’s Eveline

Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2019

This paper shows how analyzing styles in fiction can be achieved in three ways: an in-depth examination of the role assignment of lexico-syntactic features, categorization of the choices in combining words, and examination of strategies in presenting characters’ perspectives. It offers ways on how to guide students in English as a second language (ESL) in analyzing and appreciating English fiction. It aims to equip them with language tools in evaluating a writer’s intended and desired aesthetic effects by using chosen linguistic features. To achieve this objective, this paper applies M.A.K. Halliday’s systemic-functional grammatical model illustrating how language works in Joyce’s Eveline, a short story. Specifically, this paper shows how EFL or ESL students can acquire a deeper appreciation of the worldview, perspective, or point of view of the author and his characters. Also, it illustrates how they may have a deeper appreciation of the craft, originality, and ingenuity of an auth...

Paralysed: A Systemic Functional Analysis of James Joyce’s “Eveline”

ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries, 2016

In homage to the work of Uroš Mozetič, the paper takes as its starting point previously developed suggestions about how the language of “Eveline” conveys a picture of the heroine as a passive, paralysed character. Using Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics as a model of stylistic analysis, it investigates the contribution of both the ideational and the interpersonal metafunctions to the meaning of the text. The results extend and amend some ideas from the literature, such as the supposed prevalence of stative verbs, and suggest that while the short story as a whole predominantly uses material processes, their potential for change is mitigated by Joyce’s aspect, tense, and usuality choices. Eveline as the main character crucially has the role of a Senser, observing and internally reacting to the world around her, and even the processes in which she acts upon things and people are modalised and shown to be either hypothetical or instigated by others.

Narrative Infractions: The narrator's, or even the author's infraction on the character's perspective in James Joyce’s “Eveline”

2021

The narrator’s infraction on the character’s perspective in James Joyce’s “Eveline” affects the interpretation and reaction of the reader. The narrator interrupts on the character’s perspective through three ways. First, the narrator infracts on the protagonist’s perspective by using particular words/phrases that cannot belong to the protagonist; as a result, this creates a ‘dark’ image of the character’s condition in the reader’s mind. Second, the narrator interrupts on the character’s perspective via the use of the formula third person and past tense (she + past tense) that draws the focus of the reader to the protagonist, Eveline, and makes the reader connect with the protagonist and realize her hopelessness and powerlessness. Third, the narrator infracts on the protagonist’s point of view by raising questions in the story that triggers the reader and makes the reader sympathize with the protagonist of the story.

A Corpus Stylistic Analysis of Speech and Thought Presentation in James Joyce’s Dubliners

International Journal of English Linguistics, 2019

This article utilizes the theory of narrative style which is interesting from both the standpoint of literary stylistics as well as from that of the theory of communication. In this framework, the relation of a narrator to a reader is the basic relationship underlying all narrative structures. According to this basic relationship a number of ways of narration are differentiated or, as Mc Hale (1978) calls them represented/reported discourse. This article endeavours a systematic analysis of the stylistic devices used in fictional writing for the representation of a character's speech and thought. So, the present study attempts to analyze the interaction between categories of speech and thought presentation in James Joyce's Dubliners by applying Leech and Short Model (2007). Excerpts of 2000-word length have been selected and manually tagged to have the accurate annotation keeping in mind the contextual potential to recognize discourse categories in Joyce fiction and then corpus software AntConc (Laurence Anthony, 2018) was used to get quantitative results. Since fictional texts display the tendency to move between categories of speech and thought presentation as well as between the modes within one category and its demarcation is a real challenge to the researchers. The practical part of research was done on the basis of short stories from James Joyce's Dubliners. Special emphasis is given to variations between the two modes as well as to the instances of ambiguity created by their interplay.

Interpreting Marked Order Narration: The Case of James Joyce's "Eveline"

Journal of Literary Semantics, 2005

The narrative use of the reverie over the past has often been seen as part of the stock-in-trade of popular fiction. This has produced scandal and silence in about equal measure. In many critical retellings of James Joyce’s “Eveline”, for example, the strategy of silence has prevailed, even when critics like Robert Scholes have attempted to make the relationship between story and récit the focus of their attention. A second form of neglect has resulted when critics attempt to read all narrative fictions as marked order narratives. To read all Joycean first-person narratives as marked order fictions is to obliterate what distinguishes chronologically ordinary and marked order narration altogether. In contrast, by focussing on the use of a marked order narrative in “Eveline”, I attempt to demonstrate how an understanding of the significance of this authorial choice can throw into relief the basis for divergent critical interpretations of the short story. Through the use of four diagrams, I also reconstruct the two different chronological possibilities that critics use when they read “Eveline”.

Manipulating the Reader: Literary Stylistics Analysis of James Joyces A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man

Global Language Review

This study unveils some strategies deployed by James Joyce to manipulate the reader when they experience textual patterns to decipher meaning from the text. Investigating Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, this study delves into how the reader is pragmatically positioned and cognitively (mis)directed as Joyce guides their attention and influences their judgment. Thus, the text is a tool in the hand of the reader which evokes certain responses in readers and makes them invest time and struggle in understanding the text. Joyces use of speech categories and their speech acts or their summaries are crucial determining factors for the scales and corresponding modes of discourse presentation (Semino and Short 2004,p.19). The study concludes by providing the significant and functional role of the interplay between two highly complex discourse phenomena: speech acts and discourse presentation.

Of Gaps and Holes and Silence: Some Remarks on Elliptic Speech and Pseudo-Orality in James Joyce’s Short Story “The Sisters”

International Journal of Literary Linguistics, 2017

This paper discusses aspects of direct speech in James Joyce’s story “The Sisters”. The story is often analyzed with special attention to the gaps and ellipses in the utterances, which are usually read as omissions, evasions, or uncomfortable silences, and thus as indicative of some transgressive behaviour of the dead priest who is at the centre of the dialogues. In this article we explore the hypothesis that the utterances in question show features that are quite common in natural spoken language and thus may also be read as literary techniques to create authentic oral discourse. This hypothesis is not intended to invalidate previous interpretations, but to introduce an additional aspect of interpretation that has been neglected so far. In the context of a literary work, features of natural spoken language acquire new meaning, and the very attempt to narrow the gap between literary and natural spoken language appears as inauthentic, ominous and as an artistic strategy to express th...

The Art of Balance: A Corpus-assisted Stylistic Analysis of Woolfian Parallelism in «To the Lighthouse»

International Journal of English Studies, 2012

This study has a two-fold objective: 1) to examine the density and variety of parallelism in Virginia Woolf’s landmark novel To the Lighthouse through a sample-based comparison between this novel and other representative modernist novels; 2) to discuss the specific lexical and syntactic structures that characterize Woolf’s parallelism. The results are extracted from a corpus-assisted reading and sampled textual analysis of her work. It shows that Woolfian parallelism is defined by an abundance of antithetical and synonymous lexical bundles, juxtaposed propositional phrases, -ing participles and appositional structures. Those structures constitute her special sentential development which is marked by the rhetoric of opposition, the rhetoric of simultaneity and progression, and the rhetoric of specificity. It is concluded that in To the Lighthouse, Woolf manipulates the above-mentioned linguistic resources to strike an artistic balance between poetry and prose, order and chaos, the physical reality and the mental world, and finally achieves what she calls “a feminine sentence”.