A Stylistic Analysis Of Foregrounding In Dubliners

James Joyce is one great Irish novelist of the 20 th century.The collection Dubliners is his first work from traditional to innovational style.This book is composed of 15 independent short stories.It reproduces the miserable life of lower rank citizens of Dublin from aspects of children,adolescents,adults and social life of the 20 th century.In recent years,domestic scholars have done many researches of Dubliners,most of their researches focus on artistic appreciation of certain story of this collection.There is few research of Dubliners has been done with the application of linguistic theories.This research centers on the investigation of James Joyce's Dubliners by applying linguistic theories,particularly foregrounding theory in stylistics.Foregrounding mainly refers to the violation of normalization.It is Mukarovsky who first puts forward foregrounding as a theoretical concept.Then Shklovsky,Jakobson,Leech,Short and Halliday develop foregrounding into a scientific theory.Domestic scholars also pay much attention to the foregrounding theory.They employ this theory into advertisement,translation and foreign language teaching and other fields recently.This research uses two foregrounding devices deviation and over-regularity to realize description,interpretation and evaluation of this collection.The thesis intends to provide objective evidences for deeply understanding the theme and appreciating aesthetic value of Dubliners through revealing stylistic effects of foregrounding expressions in specific contexts.The author also hopes that this paper can help readers to understand other novels of Joyce.With the foregrounding theory as theoretical foundation,the thesis has discussed stylistic effects of phonological level,lexical level,syntactic level,semantic level and register.Through analysis,the author finds out that Joyce frequently employs symbols,color metaphors and repetition of words and clauses to depict paralyzed states of characters,to present characters' psychological states and reveal thoroughly the theme of paralysis.The thesis indicates that applying related linguistic theories into the analysis of literary works not only contributes to deeper comprehension of themes of novels but also helps promote the development of literature.