Continuous Relevance to ‘Unspeakable Wrongness’ in Orwell’s A Hanging: A Transitivity Analysis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14738/assrj.71.7708Keywords:
Hanging, Orwell, colonialism, transitivity, capital punishment, imperialismAbstract
ABSTRACT:
This paper is an interdisciplinary study of Orwell’s queer-literary genre piece i.e. “A Hanging” with an insight into the “unspeakable wrongness” across that 1931short story / essay by the application of Halliday’s linguistic tool of “Transitivity”. The functional linguistic theory of transitivity is very instrumental in exploring “ideational meaning” about the “on-goings” of characters’ material and mental world as expressed and documented in literature. Albeit comparatively less noticed, Orwell’s “A Hanging” is a superb experiential documentation of his intolerance and disapproval of all unspeakable wrongness in all forms found in “colonialism”, “imperialism”, and “capital punishment”, discovery of all of which through the story has an extended significance and current century relevance. The study comes up with a convincing “cosmopolitan call” for the abolishment of capital punishment. Orwell goes as a narrator mentally aloof from his imperialist fellows and stands as one “odd out” with a deciphered “anti-imperialistic” impulse inside him which marks out colonialism as the very wrong “metamorphosing” power that is in itself demoralizing and makes it a huge impossibility of “equity” among universal humanity. Orwell ended up with a “Geliliolic discovery” of imperialism paving the way of only “oppression and deprivation” of the colonized and injecting a “generic moral decay” inside them; so Orwell cuts his professional “cohortship” with this giant, wrong, inhuman system that practices far-fetched, unconvincing “power imbalance” on earth by taking away the powerless races’ “freedom of speech”, and that bursts into a large scale of “moral decay” and “hollowness” of human hearts.
References
2. Ballenger, B. P., Han, J. J., Bagley, M., & Fuquay, M. E. (2005). The curious writer. Pearson Longman.
3. Barkan, S. E., & Bryjak, G. J. (2011). Fundamentals of criminal justice: A sociological view. Jones & Bartlett Publishers.
4. Bloor, M., & Bloor, T. (2013). The practice of critical discourse analysis: An introduction. Routledge.
5. Burke, M. (Ed.). (2017). The Routledge handbook of stylistics. Routledge.
6. Carter, R., & Stockwell, P. (2008). The Language and Literature Reader. London: Routledge.
7. Chandler, D. (1976). Capital Punishment. In Capital Punishment in Canada (pp. 13-36). McGill-Queen's University Press.
8. Clark, R. (2009). Capital Punishment in Britain. Ian Allan.
9. Cunanan, B. T. (2011). Using transitivity as a framework in a stylistic analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Old Mrs. Grey. Asian EFL Journal Professional Teaching Articles, vol.54
10. Donmez, B. A. (2012). The Voice of the imperial in an Anti-Imperialist Tone: George Orwell’s Burmese Days. 비교문화연구, 28, 5-16.
11. Eggins, S. (2004). Introduction to systemic functional linguistics. A&C Black.
12. E. Hilton Hubbard (1999). Love , war and lexicogrammar: Transivity and characterization in the Moor’s Last Sigh. Journal of Literary Studies, 15 (3-4), 355-376, doi: 10.1080/02564719908530236.
13. Ezzina, R. (2015). Transitivity Analysis of The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies. 2(3)
14. Ferrara, P. (2013). Global Religions and international relations: a diplomatic perspective.
15. Fontaine, L., Bartlett, T., & O'Grady, G. (Eds.). (2013). Systemic functional linguistics: Exploring choice. Cambridge University Press.
16. Fowler, R. (1996) [1986] Linguistic Criticism, (2nd Edition), Oxford: Oxford University Press
17. Fuller, D. J. (2019). A Discourse Analysis of Habakkuk. Brill.
18. Gilroy, P. (2005). Postcolonial melancholia. Columbia University Press.
19. Hadden, B., & Luce, H.R., (1983). Time, Volume 122, Issues 20-27. Time Incorporated.
20. Halliday, M.A.K. (1970). Language structure and language function. In Lyons, J. (Ed.) New horizons in linguistics. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
21. Halliday, M. A. K. (1971). Linguistic function and literary style: An inquiry into the language of William Golding’s the inheritors. In S. Chatman (Ed.), Literary style: A symposium (pp. 330-368). London: Oxford University Press.
22. Halliday, M. A..K (1981). Types of structure. Readings in Systemic Linguistics. London: Batsford, 29-41.
23. Halliday, M. A. K. (1985). An introduction to functional grammar. London: Edward Arnold.
24. Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. (2013). Halliday's introduction to functional grammar. Routledge.
25. Jellinek, R. (1972). How Eric Blair became George Orwell. New York Times. November 12, 1972, Section BR, Page 7.
26. Johnston, J. and Bailey, H. (1906). The life of A.D. Brown. [Place of publication not identified]: Books for Business.
27. Lambercht, K.(1994). Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, Focus, and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents. Cambridge University Press
28. Leech, G. N. & Short, M. (2007). Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional prose. Edinburgh: Pearson Longman.
29. Lemmens, M. (1998). Lexical perspectives on transitivity and ergativity: causative constructions in English (Vol. 166). John Benjamins Publishing.
30. Martin, J. (1992). English text: System and structure. Amsterdam: Benjamins
31. McKenzie, P. (1982). George Orwell,'Seeing'and'Saying': A Reply to Francis Dunlop. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 16(2), 255-64.
32. Mehmood, A., Amber, R., Ameer, S. & Faiz, R. (2014). Transitivity analysis : Representation of love in Wilde’s The Nightingale and The Rose. European Journal of Research in Social Sciences. 2(4), ISSN 2053-5429.
33. Melia, P. (2015). Imperial Orwell / Orwell imperial. Atlantis, 37(2), 11-25.
34. MEYERS, J. (2010). INTRODUCTION. In Orwell: Life and Art (pp. Ix-Xii). University of Illinois Press.
35. Nababan, M. (2010). Irony In A Hanging Essay Writtened By George Orwell (Allusion to the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ). Jurnal Nuances, 1(01).
36. Nguyen, H.T. (2012).Transitivity analysis of “Heroic Mother” by Hoa Pham. International Journal of English Linguistics, 2(4). Doi: 10.5539/ijel.v2n4p85.
37. Nodoushan, M. A. S (2014). International Journal of Language Studies (IJLS)–volume 7 (1). Lulu. com.
38. Ohio. General Assembly. House of Representatives, Durbin War (1853). Legislative Report on the Subject of Capital Punishment, Made in the House of Representatives of Ohio: March 9, 1853. Harvard University.
39. Orwell, G. (1931). A hanging (pp. 44-8). Adelphi.
40. Orwell, G., & Weis, R. (2015). George Orwell: A timeless voice. In Furlong G. (Author), Treasures from UCL (pp. 182-185). London
41. Rai, A. (1990). Orwell and the politics of despair: a critical study of the writings of George Orwell. CUP Archive.
42. Rayhan, M. (2011). Analyzing clause by Halliday’s transitivity system. Jurnal Ilmu Sastra, vol. 6 (1), 22-34.
43. Rodden, J., & Rossi, J. (2012). The Cambridge Introduction to George Orwell. Cambridge University Press.
44. Rodden, J. (2014). " A Hanging": George Orwell’s Unheralded Literary Breakthrough. Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 40(1), 19-33.
45. Schabas, W. A., & Schabas, W. (2002). The abolition of the death penalty in international law. Cambridge University Press.
46. Schultz, D. A. (2014). The Encyclopedia of American Law. Infobase Publishing.
47. SCHWEIZER, B. (2001). GEORGE ORWELL. In Radicals on the Road: The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s (pp. 17-36). CHARLOTTESVILLE; LONDON.
48. Simpson, P. (2004) Stylistics: A resource book for students. London: Routledge.
49. Smith, J. (Ed.). (2019). The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the 1930s. Cambridge University Press.
50. Song, Z. (2013). Transitivity analysis of A Rose for Family. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 3(12). Doi:10.4304/tpIs.3.12.2291-2295.
51. Stansky, P., & Abrahams, W. M. (1994). The Unknown Orwell: Orwell, the Transformation. Stanford University Press.
52. Stolz, J. (1873). Murder, Capital Punishment, and the Law. Union Publishing Company. The University of California.
53. Tarrayo, V.N.(2014). Coupling of Strange Bedfellows (?): Stylistics as Link between Linguistics and Literature. International Journal of languages and Literatures. 2(2), 99-120
54. Thackeray, W. M. (1884). An Essay on the Genius of George Cruikshank: Reprinted Verbatim from" The Westminster Review". George Redway.
55. Thompson, R. C. (2019). Fire, Ice, and Physics: The Science of Game of Thrones. MIT Press.
56. Tymieniecka, A. T. (Ed.). (2002). The visible and the invisible in the interplay between philosophy, literature and reality (Vol. 75). Springer Science & Business Media.
57. Walker, R. H. (1991). Inside or Outside the Whale: George Orwell's Art and Polemic.
58. WOLOCH, A. (2016). Conclusion: Happy Orwell. In Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism (pp. 317-326). Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press.
59. Wu, D. D. (Ed.). (2008). Discourses of cultural China in the globalizing age (Vol. 1). Hong Kong University Press.
60. Yaghoobi, M. (2009). A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Selected Iranian and American Printed Media on the Representation of Hizbullah-Isreal War. Journal of Intercultural Communication, 21.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Authors wishing to include figures, tables, or text passages that have already been published elsewhere are required to obtain permission from the copyright owner(s) for both the print and online format and to include evidence that such permission has been granted when submitting their papers. Any material received without such evidence will be assumed to originate from the authors.
