A Research On Leisure Culture Of The Contemporary Urban Novel From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

This thesis intends to analyze the appraisal resources of Chinese contemporary urban novels by use of appraisal theory so as to reveal different leisure activities and leisure cultures, and then explore the features and functions of leisure culture, which can expand the applied range of appraisal theory and offer enlightenment for the exploration of the Chinese contemporary urban novels from the perspective of leisure culture.As a unique phenomenon, “leisure” means those recreational activities that aim to comfort or relax people, mentally or physically during free time. As the economy of country and people’s life has been improving, leisure has become an indispensable part in daily life. Leisure culture is a kind of social culture that linked with the economic, political, moral and ethical level of a certain historical stage. Culture nourishes leisure, and leisure cultivates the quality of culture in turn. Scholars at home and abroad did many researches on leisure and leisure culture from different angles.This thesis aims to find out different kinds of leisure culture by analyzing the evaluative resources in Chinese contemporary urban novel.Appraisal theory, proposed by Martin and his colleagues, is an improvement of the interpersonal function of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. It is used to explore the evaluative resources of a discourse and find different attitudes of people.This thesis takes appraisal theory as theoretical framework and the leisure discourse selected from Chinese contemporary urban novel as linguistic data. Authors of these novels cover seven writers whose works had won famous prizes in China. This thesis intends to divide the leisure discourse selected from the novels into attitude,engagement and graduation system and their subsystems, and explore the connection between the evaluative resources and leisure discourse by use of discourse analysis and theoretical argument, so as to find out different leisure cultures and the features and functions of leisure culture in urban novels. The problems this thesis will be solved are:(1) the connection between appraisal theory and leisure discourse in contemporary urban novel;(2) what kinds of leisure activity and leisure culture areshown by way of the appraisal resources in the contemporary urban novels;(3) how to express the features and functions of the leisure culture through appraisal resources.This research finds there exists much appraisal resources of leisure discourse in contemporary urban novel. Firstly, from the perspective of attitude system, the writer evaluates the emotional reaction of the leisure subject in order to express the attitude towards leisure by use of affect resources. Judgement resources show different kinds of leisure activities through the assessment of people’s behavior, including eating leisure, clothing leisure, residence leisure, reading leisure, banquet leisure, emotional leisure, friendship leisure and so on. Appreciation resources indicate writer’s evaluation of the value of things from the perspective of aesthetics, reflecting the favorite feelings of leisure from sideways. In engagement system, this thesis mainly focus on hetergloss resources and finds that contraction resources narrow down the dialogic space by contracting different views, expressing explicit and unique attitude towards leisure. Expansion resources open up diagolic space and allow other voices to enter into the discourse, making leisure more persuasive. In graduation system, force resources show the scope and vigor of urban city leisure, the sharpening and softening resources of focus indicate the leisure subject’s intentional strengthening and weakening attitudes of leisure. In addition, this thesis concludes different kinds of leisure culture by summarizing various leisure activities, containing leisure residence culture, leisure food culture, leisure clothing culture, leisure friendship culture, etc.The features of leisure culture: free, experiential, popular and ecological are shown.This thesis also summarizes the functions of leisure culture by evaluating the leisure resources of the contemporary urban novel: mind adjustment, self-realization and culture creation.This thesis investigates the leisure culture of the contemporary urban novel by using appraisal theory, thus provide a new way for both the application of appraisal theory and the study of the contemporary urban novel. Besides, the findings of this thesis can contribute to leisure discourse analysis and Chinese novel appreciation.