Critical Discourse Analysis and Literature

With the rise of modernity, identity gains significance. However, it is in the twentieth century that the question of identity draws the scholarly attention of the scholars in different academic fields. More seriously, identity turns into a thorny problem for the minority groups. Although immersed in the African American community, Toni Morrison's fiction problematizes black identity. Traditional approaches to Morrison's fiction have considered identity as a cultural or racial paradigm. This book, however, adopts different theories of Critical Discourse Analysis to analyse the issue of identity and realizes that subjectivity is a more volatile construct in accordance with different discourses in their diachronic and synchronic dimensions. The analysis can shed a new light on the notion of subjectivity in the minority literature. More importantly, it provides a strategy of analysis of the literary discourse through the synthesis of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), Appraisal system, Discursive strategies, pragmatics and Critical Discourse Analysis. It could be of special help to those interested in literary criticism and theory, linguistics, and social sciences.