A Research Of Ironic Art In The Man That Corruted Hadleburg

Appraisal Theory, as a complement and extension of the interpersonal function inSFG, is developed by a group of researchers led by James R. Martin in1990s.According to Martin and Rose (2003:22), the appraisal resources are used for“negotiating our social relationships, by telling our listeners or readers how we feelabout things and people (in a word, what our attitudes are)”. The appraisal systemexplains the way speakers\writers give judgements to people, people’s utterances,material objects, affairs and states of affairs, and explores the way that relevantattitudes, evaluations and emotions are explicitly or implicitly presented in texts. Thissystem consists of three subsystems: Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. In thisthesis, the Attitude System is adopted to analyze the ironic art in Mark Twain’snovella.American best-known writer, novelist, humorist, as well as an outstandingrepresentative of American critical realism, has been lauded as “the father ofAmerican literature”. Mark Twain and his works have gained worldwide attention andbeen analyzed from different angles, among which irony and satire are alwayshotspots. The novella The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg, as Mark Twain’s classicand most famous middle-length novel, best expresses the ironic effect and has beenincreasingly favored by many scholars, since it was written in the second period ofMark Twain’s creation witnessing his writing style changing from light humor toharsh satire. The framework of Attitude System in Appraisal Theory is adopted for theanalysis of the ironic art embedded in this novella is interpreted.In order to reach this purpose, three topics are studied: irony to ugliness ofhuman nature (especially the bourgeoisie), irony to money worship and irony toracism. Correspondently, three case studies are made, including the attitude resourcesin Mr. Richards’ utterances, those referring to money and those to the fabricatedservice to Goodson.By analyzing the attitude resources in the three case studies, major findings areconcluded as follow:First, through the case study of the attitude resources in Mr. Richards’ utterances,ambivalence, changes, contradictions and inconsistence, which are reflected amongall the three subsystems, are considered as important features of this figure throughout the whole text. Those contradictions and changes make a combined contributions tothe portrait of the major figure in the novella and supply an ironic effect to theugliness of the figure, who is selected by Mark Twain as a representative of thebourgeoisie in that era.Second, through the case study of the resources to money, it is found out thatthrough the relevant attitude resources the author provides readers the attraction ofmoney, the series of drastic and dramatic emotional changes, the same greed to moneyand the two sets of contradictory attitudes with similarity–greed to money, all ofwhich make contributions to the interpretation of the ironic effect to money worshipheld as community values by Hadleyburg, which as a miniature of America at therising time of capitalism is a reflection of the whole American society. Therefore, thiscase study explained the ironic effect to the author’s exposure of the false communityvalues–money worship, not only shared by Hadleyburg in a fiction, but also by theAmerican society in the real world.Besides, through the case study of the resources to Mr. Richards’ fabricatedservice to Goodson, the major figure of the novella is exposed as a racist, and MarkTwain’s irony to racism is explained through the process of fabricating and thecontradictory between the figure’s positive attitudes to the “service” and the negativeresult by the so-called “service”. From the perspective of Appraisal Theory, it isinnovative in this research to explain the ironic art to racism, which is merely reachedby former studies, even in the aspect of literature.