FICTIONALCDISCOURSEINGRAHAM GREENE'SMONSIGNORQUIXOTE:A PRAGMATIC A PPROACH

Abstract

Both fiction writers and scholars have commented on dialogue's unique ability to engage the reader in the story and so, give that story a sense of reality (Wharton 1970 and Tenner 1988). Despite this recognition, dialogue in fiction has received a relatively scant attention by scholars. A few have described methods of presenting fictional character speech (Leech 1981;Volosinov 1971). Langleben (1983) has devised a limited formal

description of dialogue. Page (1988) has systematically described dialects and idiolects represented in single instances of fictional character speech in order to analyze a character, though he pays minimal attention to dialogue as conversation, that is, a series of interactive speech acts between characters. After all, in comparison to narrative, dialogue typically takes up few words in fictional texts. Of course, works such as Graham Greene's Monsignor Quixote (1982) dose exemplify the centrality of dialogue for some fictional works and suggests that dialogue- and hence fictional discourse - should be rightly focused on as long as we have the tools to deal with it. In this thesis, three pragmatic approaches are applied to dialogue from Graham Greene's Monsignor Quixote (1982) in order to provide interpretations of characters and their verbal interactions. In the process, the research considers how well these approaches serve literary interpretation and speculates on what a pragmatics for literary interpretation of fictional discourse might be like. The approaches employed are those of Pragmatic Presupposition, developed by Stalnaker (1973,1974,1978); Prince (1979,1981a) and Eco and Violi (1987) in their characterization of pragmatic presupposition as "inferable" and "unused" as opposed to "brand-new". The second approach is John Searle's (1979) elaboration of John Austin's Speech Act Theory (1975) in the form of taxonomy of illocutionary acts; and a description of indirect speech acts, in addition to making use of the conception of "micro" and "macro" speech acts developed by van-Dijk (1977-1981). Finally, Grice's theory of Conversational Implicature (1975),