A Functional Approach To The Reception Of Yan Lianke's Novels In The English-Speaking World

In recent years,Chinese writer Yan Lianke has become increasingly influential in the world,especially in the English-speaking world.Undoubtedly,it should give credit to his English translators represented by Carlos Rojas.Meanwhile,the Appraisal Theory,one of the extensions and expansion of Systematic Functional Linguistics(SFL),is developing an increasingly close relationship with translation studies.Thus,this thesis attempts to explore the reception of Yan Lianke's novels in the English-speaking world from the perspective of Attitude system,one of the subsystems of the Appraisal Theory.The major research object in this thesis is the reviews of the translations for Yan Lianke's novels that extracted from the world' s largest e-commerce platform,Amazon,with that from professional readers and mainstream media as the supplementary.In so doing,we can have a glimpse of western “readers' expectation” and thus to provide a certain reference for Chinese literature to go global.Specifically speaking,the present study aims to find out what is the characteristics of the reception of Yan Lianke's novels in the English-speaking world through the analysis of the attitudinal discourses in the book reviews,what sort of reader's expectations can be reflected from these characteristics,and how to promote Chinese literature to go global smoothly from the perspective of readers' expectations.To this end,this study combines qualitative analysis with quantitative analysis,with the former as the core by summarizing,comparing and analyzing the corpus collected from all sides.For the sake of operation-friendly,the author develops an analytical framework,based on the Attitude system developed by Martin and White(2005).On the whole,this framework can be divided into three sub-categories according to the attitude tendency,namely,affect-oriented reception,judgement-oriented reception and appreciation-oriented reception.Furthermore,inthe light of different evaluation emphases in readers' feedback,the above-mentioned three categories can be subdivided into four categories each.Taking “affect-oriented reception” as an example,it can be further grouped into “affect-oriented reception for the author”,“affect-oriented reception for the source text”,“affect-oriented reception for the translator” and “affect-oriented reception for the target text”.The other two categories can also be subdivided accordingly.Under such a framework,the further data processing work can be carried out smoothly.It can be concluded that the percentage of judgement and appreciation resources in the reviews of Yan's novels takes the majority,which roughly embodies the objectiveness and authoritativeness of the critics or the media.Besides,judging from the content of the reviews,we can see that all the reviews gathered from each party share a positive or negative side.Moreover,the western readers tend to focus on whether a certain novel is interesting,reader-friendly or not,rather than on the quality of its translation,which may be the possible “readers' expectation”.As such,we need to pay special attention to the reviews from the mainstream media in that the attitude expressed by them may have great influence on average readers.The study sheds some light on the striking differences in attitudinal features among different reader groups.It integrates the core concepts of the Appraisal Theory with that of the newly established analytical framework of reception so as to facilitate the analysis of reception in a measurable and visualized manner.However,in light of the intrinsic complexity of attitude and reception as well as the limited corpus scale in this study,further research is expected to be carried out under the premise of establishing a larger database and integrating reception with the other two critical components(engagement and graduation)within the Appraisal Theory.