Abstract

BANEGAS, Darío Luis. Understanding a reader's attraction to a literary short text. Colomb. Appl. Linguist. J. [online]. 2014, vol.16, n.1, pp.105-113. ISSN 0123-4641.  https://doi.org/10.14483/udistrital.jour.calj.2014.1.a09.

The aim of this article is to understand why a reader may feel attracted to a short piece of fictional discourse. I analyse a short extract taken from Khaled Hosseini's novel A Thousand Splendid Suns through the integration of different perspectives in discourse analysis. First, I analyse the text in terms of contexts of culture and situation including field, tenor, mode, participants' social world, setting, channel, and key. In the second section, I attempt to examine the text line by line following my interdisciplinary framework of reference. Secondly, I offer a line-by-line analysis through Grice's maxims, topicality, deixis, coding time, types of utterances and verbal processes, and metaphors. Through my analysis, I discovered that my attraction as a reader was based on the combination and integration of different textual devices and my personal interpretation of the pragmatics behind the text.

Keywords : context; discourse analysis; fiction; Hosseini; pragmatics; speech act.

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