Nazneen’s Growth:A Study Of Brick Lane By Using Politeness Theory

Monica Ali, as one of famous British Bangladeshi writers, exerts great influence on Bangladeshi literature and British literature. And Brick Lane, Ali’s debut novel, has won Ali instant success as a writer since its publication in 2003.There are numerous lifesome conversations and language individualization can vividly portray characters’ personality, thoughts and interpersonal relations in this novel. This paper intends to take Nazneen as focal point and her conversations with others as corpora, by using Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory to explore her change in family relations, social relations and political life, which will provide a new perspective to understand the novel.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one is the introduction part, which mainly introduces the writer and her works, especially her first novel Brick Lane, the politeness theory of Brown and Levinson which can provide theoretical foundation for the further analysis of Brick Lane, and the literature review on Brick Lane home and abroad. Chapter two is about Nazneen’s positive development in family relations. In this chapter, negative politeness will be used to analyze how Nazneen and Chanu observe or flout each other’s basic negative-face wants, thus to explore Nazneen’s gradual equality to her husband. And bald-on-record strategies will be utilized to explore the mother-and-daughter relation. By analyzing Nazneen’s and her daughters’ reaction to each other’s baldly, without redressive action, Nazneen’s intimacy with her daughters will be founded. Chapter three explores Nazneen’s gradual maturity in social relations, and mainly analyzes how Nazneen makes progress in interacting with various people in positive politeness and off-record strategy, such as her friend, her lover and the acquaintances. Chapter four discusses the awakening of Nazneen’s political consciousness. In this chapter, positive politeness observing and flouting will be used to explore Nazneen’s change in political right consciousness and political participation consciousness. Chapter five is the conclusion, which is about the main finding. It can be concluded that Brick Lane can be taken as a bildungsroman, and Nazneen makes great progress in family relations, social relations and political life.