Speech Acts And Intertextuality Of Don Delillo’s Game6: A Pragmatic Study

Even though the screenplay has been in existence since the creation of the film for more than one hundred years, it has received little academic attention either at home or abroad. One reason is that the film is always taken as part of an industrial and technological process, not in the same stand as the play, prose, poetry or novel, which are considered more creative forms with less complicated production process. Also, the emphases have long been laid on the writing techniques of screenplay. There have been an excess of publications of how to write a screenplay but there has been a meager amount of published academic work which studies the screenplay itself. In fact, screenplay analysis has been a blank in literary criticism, stylistic studies or pragmatic studies or other fields of studies. This dissertation, then, is a research indicating a surge of interest in the subject and it focuses on the pragmatic perspective in analyzing the screenplay, directing primarily at the speech acts in the screenplay and extending the analysis with a broader view of including the intertextuality of it with other works of the writer so that a better understanding of the screenplay can be achieved.The screenplay Game6written by Don DeLillo was chosen for analysis because DeLillo is generally regarded as one of the most prolific and influential novelists and sharpest social critics of the contemporary American social life with depiction of satiric yet penetrating portraits of rampant paranoia, malaise, myths, obsessions, and others. In his exploration of the power of mass media, the crowd psychology, and the excesses of consumer culture, he also writes about the American sports. In China, Don DeLillo’s works, particularly his novels, have long been studied, mostly on their themes and language. However, little or no concern has been given to his screenplays or to how the language of sports can act as a cohesive force through utterances. The purpose of this research, then, is to adopt the speech act theory in analyzing Game6along with its intertexutality analysis in hope of offering feasible methodology for the screenplay study and for further researches on DeLillo’s works.A four level analytical framework was constructed for an overall study of Game6. The speech act analysis of Game6aims at instilling an understanding of sports language and the role of the screenplay in shaping ideology and social values, a revealing of how sport both unifies individuals, social classes, racial and ethnic groups, a demonstrating of how the United States permeates the sports language into people’s life by representing its popular culture and the social value as well as political climate that the culture belongs to, so that the relation between language, power and ideology can be interpreted. The speech act of Game6also comprises the apprehension of the characters and their relations through the analysis of its basic elements, which are the scene directions, monologues, the slug lines and the dialogues. Besides, the analysis attempts to go beyond Game6itself so as to comprehend as completely as possible its meanings through a probe into the intertextuality between Game6, Underworld and Cosmopolis so that the influences of DeLillo’s early works on his later works can be understood.The analysis of Game6endeavors to offer a perspective on how constitutive rules are in relation to rules of baseball, which is a rule-governed practice, how the baseball game may accord with the American sense of fair play, team play, and athletic excellence, how it can retain the significance as a cultural resource that dramatizes the best hopes of the nation, how baseball is able to call upon a historical pattern in which it has been inextricably bound to national character. The love for baseball game in Game6has eliminated the conflicts between the major characters and expresses the theme that "Baseball is life" and "Life is good". Therefore, baseball, as the national pastime of the United States, has symbolized not only the spirit of freedom, but also suppressed the differences between different races, genders and ideologies, thus becoming a way out for the spiritual crisis facing the Americans in the postmodern era.