Chapter Overview

• • communication in fiction

• • critical linguistics

• • checklist of critical linguistic categories

• • Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday

• • critical linguistic analysis of an extract from Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Introduction

In the previous two chapters, we analysed two modern poems using the formalist and functionalist frameworks. In this chapter, and in the next one, we analyse fiction. This chapter uses the analytical framework of CRITICAL LINGUISTICS to analyse an epistolary novel – a novel written in the form of letters. The first part of the chapter outlines the nature of communication in fiction and proposes a checklist of categories to use in carrying out your own critical linguistic analyses on the extracts suggested for independent study in activities 4.1 and 4.2. In the second part of the chapter, we carry out a critical linguistic analysis of an extract from the novel Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday (2011). We will look at the way MODALITY and modes of narration carry ideological viewpoint and authorial attitude.

Communication in fiction

A novel is a lengthy literary work written in prose containing a narrative about human experience. It offers an extended and imaginative representation of reality narrated from a particular perspective. The reader reconstructs this account of reality through the language of the text, but this reconstruction is often affected by the perspective from which the narrative is told. It could be told by one character to another, by a narrator to a narratee, or by the author to the reader. These three levels of discourse structure correspond to three possible viewpoints from which the story may be narrated. The technique of narration not only affects the way events are represented but also conditions readers’ viewpoints and reactions to the narrative. This should explain why the ‘study of the novel in the twentieth-century has to a very large extent been the study of point of view’ (Short [1996] 2014: 256).

There are many linguistic means of presenting, and manipulating, readers’ ideological outlooks on the account of experience in the narrative. This chapter focuses on modality and the modes of narration and presentation of character talk and thought as carriers of (ideological) perspective.