A BIDIMENSIONAL INVESTIGATION OF JOYCEAN STYLE: THE INTERRELATION OF ATTITUDINAL AND PRACTICAL ANALYSES OF JOYCE'S THE DEAD

Numerous approaches can be taken to analyze a literary text. They whether focus on the language of the text or the social and the historical background of the text. The first ignores the spirit of the work and the latter is considered to be subjective. The present research employed a combination of these two pre-established approaches to avoid the deficiencies of every one of them. To achieve this purpose, the focus was on the epiphany of Joyce's The Dead. Looking through practical analysis, the epiphany peels off the lovely crust of their life, and the ugly reality emerges. Considering Joyce's specific style where language is more than just a tool to transfer the epiphany, the researchers attempted to explore the language before and after the epiphany to investigate if the language undergoes the same moment of revelation and the subsequent transformations. To this aim, the Appraisal framework was employed ? a young and recent framework within Systemic Functional Linguistics, which as the name suggests investigates appraisals/evaluations in discursive productions. The language of The Dead was analyzed utilizing the Attitude subsystem of the Appraisal framework, and the statistical data obtained out of the Attitudinal analysis of The Dead confirmed inlinedness of the evaluative language of the story with characterization, narration, plot, and of course the epiphany. Therefore, it is concluded that the findings of the Attitudinal analysis and the Practical Analysis were in line with each other, and the method employed in the present study would be considered as a suitable method for objective and combined investigation of literary works, especially Joyce’s style, works, and his conscious use of language in them.