Literary Discourse Analysis of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (A Critical Approach )

Abstract

The present thesis has explained the discourse of the characters in Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway to find out the linguistic conditions under which readers construct their understanding of the message the author intended to deliver. In fact, these linguistic conditions are adapted to state the real meanings of the novel. Woolf has planned her discourse using different linguistic tools (e.g. apposition, coherence, ellipsis and the rhythm of her language) to create in her readers overwhelming feelings of suspense. They move backward and forward with her characters' discourse, either consciously or through their interior monologues, to catch the meanings of ' her ambiguous themes. But despite this fact, the discourse of her characters

is in harmony with her prose and her readers are taken by this harmony up to the end of the novel.

The study applied the theory of speech acts to analyze Woolf's prose and found out that she was very successful in choosing her speech acts to express her point of view. She used the acts on the locutionary level but she depended mainly on the implications of these acts on the illocutionary a.nd perlocutionary levels. In addition, one can notice that the categories of the speech acts, found in the novel, were numerous. This gave the insinuahon that Woolf intended to use nearly all the speech categories toconvey her message and not to be committed to one particular meaning.

Moreover, Woolf uses different modes of speech presentation. She did not use one mode only which gave her the chance to move from one consciousness to another.