An Analysis of the Discourse of Biographies

An Analysis of the Discourse of Biographies 1 PART 1: INTRODUCTION 1. RATIONALE There have always been biographies since the dawn of human writing – works that chronicle the changes that these normal men bring to the world. The early days of biographies were evidenced in ancient Assyrian, Babylonian and Mesopotamian society. Ancient Greece and Roman Empire also had biographies for religious purposes. Through the Medieval, then the Renaissance until modern days of history, this literary-historical genre persists. Perhaps to understand what great men did with their time and circumstances is always the concern of the other people – great or ordinary they may be. Nowadays, biography is one of the most popular categories of books. A simple search with the key word “biography” at www.amazon.com yields 220,442 results; 7,303 biographical dictionaries 787 biographical encyclopedias available on this popular book vendor website. These impressive statistics are undoubtedly indicators to the popularity of biographies. According to Nye (2006), a 1994 poll on reading habits in Britain revealed biography to be the most popular category of non-fiction book and a genre considerably ahead of contemporary fiction (preferred by 19% percent of readers, compared to 14% for contemporary fiction.) James Atlas, a biographer and the editor of the Penguin Lives Series, writes in the New York Times Book Review of a rainy afternoon leisurely spent in a London bookshop, where he was “stunned by the sheer profusion of ‘lives’, as the British people call biographies”. Biographies of Churchill lined an entire back wall, surrounded by shelves of biographies of people unknown or unfamiliar to Atlas. Greene (2006), over the past few years reading the “Book Review” section of the New York Times, noticed a pattern: biography is reviewed more frequently. “One year, 2000, I counted: there were 188 reviews of books related to biography, amounting to three-plus reviews each Sunday. Curious, I dug around in the Bowker Annual and confirmed my inkling. In 1994, 1,758 biographies were published in the United States; seven years later, 4,887 appeared.” An Analysis of the Discourse of Biographies 2 The importance of biographies to the education of children and young adults need hardly be stressed. Even a mature person can still benefit from a biography. Kett (2002) noticed that twelve- and thirteen-year-olds were beginning to break away from fiction and she believed that biographies make a good literary transition into non-fiction. Any grown-up adults must stretch their imagination to hypothesize how they have grown up without reading one or more biographies of some famous persons. American magazines in the nineteenth century, according to Kiskis (1999), published myriad articles on the purposes of biography. In their diaries, women and men in all U.S. regions described reading biographies and taking useful lessons from them. Biographies are certainly not primarily a vehicle for meeting the insatiable demands of a public that made and dropped celebrities, every fifteen minutes. When biographies succeed, they did so by influencing people’s lives, not just stimulating their imaginations literary or otherwise. In Kiskis’s dictum, biography has “constructive, cultural purposes”. Such omnipresent and influential as biographies are, they have received little attention from linguists. Biographies have never been investigated in the light of DA and related linguistic research work is scanty, therefore implying the need for a DA of biographical discourse. Most research pertaining biographies are from historians, scientists and demographers, who utilize the biographical data to analyze the political, social and demographic situations of a particular country at a particular historical period, especially in the past. Almost no research work in linguistics which derive its data from biographies can be identified. If biographies are even more popular than contemporary fictions and a multitude of people are reading the genre today, exploring the distinctive characteristics of the genre is an imperative task for the linguistic researcher. TIME’s series of articles namely “100 Most Important People of the Century” is among those biographical works that do not teach – they inspired. The first reason why this series is intriguing lies in its attempt to vote for the most important people of the 20th century. From a revolutionary to an entertainer, from a scientist to a hero of courage and selflessness, from a person from a small country, to the president of a vast territory, from a child to an elderly woman: all of them engraved in the 20th century traces that cannot be An Analysis of the Discourse of Biographies 3 erased. The second reason why this series of articles deserves exploration is its language. Briefness, clear organization and eloquence are the first impressions. In order to have a holistic look at the genre of biography, we choose to follow the approach of discourse analysis. Only by using the DA approach can the genre of biography be comprehensively inspected. Thus we choose the name of the thesis “An Analysis of Biographical Discourse”. 2. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY The aim of the study is to examine the characteristics of biographical discourse, both at the holistic and analytic level. The objectives of the study specifically are: - To investigate the biographical characterization through transitivity and point of view. - To frame a template biographical discourse structure More detailed explication as how the aforementioned objectives have been formulated and how these objectives can be attained is specified in Chapter 2: Methodology. 3. SCOPE OF THE STUDY Although we are well aware that the wider the range of biographical data we achieve from, the more reliable the research results will be. However, within the constraints of time and resources, the data that we opted for include 30 out of the 100 biographical articles that are compiled by the TIME ® magazine in 2001 in the serialized “100 Most Important People of the Century”. Criteria for ensuring the representativeness of the data are as follows: - biographies of people that have influence in different areas: science, revolution, innovation, entertainment and philanthropy - biographies of both male and female personifications of the century - biographies written by both male and female biographers An Analysis of the Discourse of Biographies 4 4. METHODOLOGY We choose the descriptive research approach as it grants permission to our attainment of the objectives. First of all, the descriptive research is both synthetic (holistic) and analytic (constituent). This characteristic is in accord with our general research aim: to investigate the characteristics of biographical discourse both at the macro level and at the constituent level. Secondly, the descriptive research operates on the basis of hypotheses, thus its deductive nature. In our study, hypotheses are generated based on previous related research and careful study on distinguishing features of the biographical genre (see chapter 2 for the study’s hypotheses). Thirdly, the descriptive study aims to gather data without any manipulation of the research context, which makes it non-intrusive and deal with naturally occurring data. Our data are pre-existing as published articles and the preexistent data are retained without any adjustment of the researcher. Fourthly, the descriptive study’s subjects can be both treated as individuals and individual variations, enabling the average behavior for the subjects group. Therefore, each biography in our archive can be explored in details and variations in the results yielded can be compared and conclusions can be drawn with regards to the underlying reasons for the differences. Average numerical results can also be attained to describe the general characteristics of the genre as a whole. 5. ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY The thesis consists of 3 main parts: - Part 1 is Introduction, which discusses the rationale, the aims and objectives of the study, the scope of the study, methodology used in the study and the organization of the study - Part 2 is Development, which includes three chapters as follows; - Chapter 1 - Literature Review: This chapter presents all related theoretical background that precedes and necessitates the formation of our research - Chapter 2 - Methodology: This chapter describes the research procedures that have been utilized in the study An Analysis of the Discourse of Biographies 5 - Chapter 3 – Data Analysis: This chapter presents and discusses the data collected and is divided into three major parts: data regarding actions and events in biographies, point of view in biographies and biographical discourse structure. - Part 3 is Conclusion, which summarizes the major findings and implications of the research and suggestions for further study An Analysis of the Discourse of Biographies 6 PART 2: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1 LITERATURE REVIEW In this chapter, a range of fundamental theoretical concepts will be introduced. First of all, definitions pertaining to what is meant by discourse and discourse analysis, the backbone concepts of this research paper, are presented in 1.1. as a gateway to the understanding of the consecutive notions and models. Second, a taxonomy of discourse type is discussed in 1.2. in order to prove that biography is qualified for discourse analysis (henceforth DA). Third, discussions of methods in DA are included in 1.3. Fourth, in 1.4., theoretical background regarding definitions of biography, types of biography, the concepts of genre and style are set forth. Simpson’s model of elements in narrative discourse is discussed in section 1.5. Halliday’s categorization of Actions and Events is presented in 1.6. Section 1.7. introduces the Leech and Short’s classification of speech and thought, whereas 1.8. discusses Labov’s model of narrative discuss. * * * 1.1. DISCOURSE AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS According to Cook (1994), the recent decades have seen a very considerable growth of interest in discourse analysis. Therefore, the term ‘discourse’ has been widely used by linguists. Most of them defined discourse as language in its social contexts. For example, Potter in Wood & Kroger (2000) offers a definition of discourse as text and talks in social practices. That is, the focus is not on language as an abstract entity such as lexicon and set of grammatical rules (in linguistics) or a systems of differences (in structuralism). Instead, language is the medium for interaction; analysis of discourse becomes, then, analysis of what people do with language. Embedded in Potter’s definition of discourse and discourse analysis is the assumption of the difference between text and discourse, whereby discourse is a process or a practice and text (or talk) is the product of that process. An Analysis of the Discourse of Biographies 7 The aforementioned perspective on discourse and DA stands in correspondence to that of earlier linguists. Brown & Yule (1983) considers DA the analysis of language in use. As such, DA cannot be restricted to the description of linguistic forms independent of the purposes of functions which those forms are designed to serve in human affairs. Cook (1994) claims that DA has focused very much upon the social nature of communication, stressing contextual aspects of meaning which are interactive and negotiated, determined by the social relations and identities of the participants in communication. Halliday, as cited by Cook (1994), holds the view that language is a social semiotic and believes that the function of all discourse is a blend of interpersonal and ideational. As in Brown & Yule (1983), the two corresponding functions of discourse, in their own terms, are interactional and transactional. From all the definitions of discourse and DA, an inference can be safely drawn: DA cannot be restricted to the description of text. However, the linguistic pitfall here may lead to a DA novice to the conclusion that the descriptive method has been deprived of its import in DA. According to Coulhart (1994), all branches of linguistics are first and foremost descriptive. Please note that the descriptive factor of DA does not and should not hinder the parameter of the area. 1.2. TYPES OF DISCOURSE There are a number of ways of classifying discourse. As Wood & Kroger (2000) noted, we can probably agree on the specifications for gross categorizations, for example, written versus spoken discourse or telephone versus face-to-face talk, and we have no trouble identifying a particular instance of discourse as a member of such category. The issue will be less manageable if we notice that the difference between different types of discourse can be a matter of structure (e.g. of turn-taking, the use of pauses) or a matter of orientation to power and purpose. Wood & Kroger (2000) also highlights the obscurity of discourse categorization by the specious dichotomy of monologue and dialogue. They claim that all discourse are dialogic in nature. In sum, we cannot make statements about forms of discourse in general in terms of some set of essential properties. Wood & Kroger (2000) denies the possibility of an exhaustive list of all types of discourse, but proposes a tentative possible data that DA researcher may draw upon. An Analysis of the Discourse of Biographies 8 Spoken discourse Written discourse Sub-type Examples Sub-type Examples Locations: home, school, offices or work sites, etc. Face-to-face Activities: household chores, recreational interactions, parties, meetings, etc. Correspondence Letters, memoranda, messages, e-mail (including “chat” group) Telephone Conference calls, calls to information, compliant, reservation, etc. Publications Articles in magazines, newspapers, journals, books, book chapters, etc. Mediated or other Television, film, documentaries, etc. Unpublished Dairies, shopping lists, memos, notes, etc. Table 1: Types of Discourse The kind of discourse probed in this research is a series of articles from the TIME magazine – therefore, it is written discourse and belongs to the subtype of publications. The biographical nature of the selected data will be reserved for later discussions in 1.4. 1.3. METHODS OF DISCOURSE ANALYSIS In the field of DA, various methods have been developed. According to Hatch (2001), when we follow one method, adopting the units and processes described by that method, we arrive at one picture of what discourse is. When we follow another method, the picture changes as the units and processes change and the focus of the research changes. Each new method adds another layer to the total discourse picture. Moreover, none of the methods seems more “correct” than the others; each has its own purpose – some focus on writer’s intent, others on component forms or templates, and others on more abstract notions of how discourse and language may be modeled or mapped as cognitive system. Wood & Kroger (2000) offers a three-way classification An Analysis of the Discourse of Biographies 9 Methods in DA 1. Goffman’s system components 2. Labov and Waletsky’s narrative structures 3. Levinson’s (1983) deictic and Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion ties 4. Analysis of differences in features across modes A. Linguistic and cognitive templates (text characteristics) 5. Speech act analysis 1. Schank and Abelson’s script analysis 2. Mann and Thompson’s rhetorical structure analysis 3. Participant cohesion 4. Pragmatics of speech acts B. Linguistic and cognitive processes (text structures results from selection/ activation based on speaker’s/writer’s goals and intents) 5. Clece-Murcia’s (1980) contextual analysis 1. Schegloff’s conversational analysis 2. Goffman’s ritual constraints; the playing of ‘self’ 3. Labov’s evaluation component 4. Tannen’s and Chafe’s (1982) involvement features C. Social, linguistic and cognitive processes (text structure evolves from socially built communication) 5. Speech event analysis Table 2: Methods in DA Wood & Kroger (2000) only sketch “very roughly and broadly” the major perspectives or groups of perspectives that they find most useful for conducting research: DASP (Discourse Analysis in Social Psychology), CA (Conversation Analysis), CDA (Critical Discourse Analysis) and works in pragmatics. Wood & Kroger states that all of the major perspectives share an emphasis on discourse as practice, on the phenomena constructed in discourse, on the action being accomplished. There are differences in the sorts of discourse with which researchers work; to some extent, these line up with different perspectives. Like Hatch (2001), Wood & Kroger (2000) discourage the idea of there being a or the method of DA. However, they are also mindful of the potential pitfalls of eclecticism. They do not propose a simple combination of approaches or methods, but suggests that each researcher should have a strategy of drawing upon resources – notions, techniques, devices, and strategies from different perspectives as appropriate to the specific project at hand. They have a predilection for made-to-order DA rather than off-the-rack DA. From Hatch (2001) and Wood & Kroger (2000), the methods for a DA research should depend on the resources of data. In the following parts of the chapter, we will discuss the characteristics of the data that we chose to research: biographical discourse. An Analysis of the Discourse of Biographies 10 1.4. BIOGRAPHY 1.4.1. Definitions Gentz (2001) states that biography is a recent term in Western lexicon, although the tradition of biography extends back to antiquity. Biography was often practiced to memorialize, commemorate, extol, and morally instruct readers and listeners. The word biographer was first used by Thomas Fuller in his History of the Worthies of England, written in 1662, where he argued for a more objective approach to writing, even about saintly figures (Parke, 13-14). The word biography was first used by John Dryden in 1683, who wrote on one of the earliest practitioners of biography, Plutarch (Winslow, 8). According to Désilets (2006), biography is the study of a life. It reveals a personality and an analysis of an individual’s work in the context of the age in which it existed. The author or biographer does not merely recount a narrative; they make judgment about what the individual was like and about their significance in history. Biography can also be the story of a person's life written by someone other than the subject of the work. A biographical work is supposed to be somewhat factual. However, since the biographer may be prejudiced in favor of or against the subject of the biography, critics, and sometimes the subject of the biography may come forward to challenge the accuracy of the material. As analyzed in the Introduction, biography is the most popular categories of books – and indeed the most popular category among nonfiction books, according to one British poll. Nye (2006) claims that a 1994 poll on reading habits in Britain revealed biography to be the most popular category of nonfiction book and a genre considerably ahead of contemporary fiction (preferred by 19 percent of readers, compare to 14 percent for contemporary fiction). Biographies also hold an important place in the history of Canada, according to Désilets (2006). According to