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An Analysis of the Discourse of Biographies

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PART 1: INTRODUCTION

1. RATIONALE

There have always been biographies since the dawn of human writing – works that

chronicle the changes that these normal men bring to the world. The early days of

biographies were evidenced in ancient Assyrian, Babylonian and Mesopotamian society.

Ancient Greece and Roman Empire also had biographies for religious purposes. Through

the Medieval, then the Renaissance until modern days of history, this literary-historical

genre persists. Perhaps to understand what great men did with their time and circumstances

is always the concern of the other people – great or ordinary they may be.

Nowadays, biography is one of the most popular categories of books. A simple search with

the key word “biography” at www.amazon.com yields 220,442 results; 7,303 biographical

dictionaries 787 biographical encyclopedias available on this popular book vendor website.

These impressive statistics are undoubtedly indicators to the popularity of biographies.

According to Nye (2006), a 1994 poll on reading habits in Britain revealed biography to be

the most popular category of non-fiction book and a genre considerably ahead of

contemporary fiction (preferred by 19% percent of readers, compared to 14% for

contemporary fiction.) James Atlas, a biographer and the editor of the Penguin Lives

Series, writes in the New York Times Book Review of a rainy afternoon leisurely spent in a

London bookshop, where he was “stunned by the sheer profusion of ‘lives’, as the British

people call biographies”. Biographies of Churchill lined an entire back wall, surrounded by

shelves of biographies of people unknown or unfamiliar to Atlas.

Greene (2006), over the past few years reading the “Book Review” section of the New

York Times, noticed a pattern: biography is reviewed more frequently. “One year, 2000, I

counted: there were 188 reviews of books related to biography, amounting to three-plus

reviews each Sunday. Curious, I dug around in the Bowker Annual and confirmed my

inkling. In 1994, 1,758 biographies were published in the United States; seven years later,

4,887 appeared.”

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The importance of biographies to the education of children and young adults need hardly

be stressed. Even a mature person can still benefit from a biography. Kett (2002) noticed

that twelve- and thirteen-year-olds were beginning to break away from fiction and she

believed that biographies make a good literary transition into non-fiction. Any grown-up

adults must stretch their imagination to hypothesize how they have grown up without

reading one or more biographies of some famous persons. American magazines in the

nineteenth century, according to Kiskis (1999), published myriad articles on the purposes

of biography. In their diaries, women and men in all U.S. regions described reading

biographies and taking useful lessons from them. Biographies are certainly not primarily a

vehicle for meeting the insatiable demands of a public that made and dropped celebrities,

every fifteen minutes. When biographies succeed, they did so by influencing people’s

lives, not just stimulating their imaginations literary or otherwise. In Kiskis’s dictum,

biography has “constructive, cultural purposes”.

Such omnipresent and influential as biographies are, they have received little attention

from linguists. Biographies have never been investigated in the light of DA and related

linguistic research work is scanty, therefore implying the need for a DA of biographical

discourse.

Most research pertaining biographies are from historians, scientists and demographers,

who utilize the biographical data to analyze the political, social and demographic situations

of a particular country at a particular historical period, especially in the past.

Almost no research work in linguistics which derive its data from biographies can be

identified. If biographies are even more popular than contemporary fictions and a

multitude of people are reading the genre today, exploring the distinctive characteristics of

the genre is an imperative task for the linguistic researcher.

TIME’s series of articles namely “100 Most Important People of the Century” is among

those biographical works that do not teach – they inspired. The first reason why this series

is intriguing lies in its attempt to vote for the most important people of the 20th century.

From a revolutionary to an entertainer, from a scientist to a hero of courage and

selflessness, from a person from a small country, to the president of a vast territory, from a

child to an elderly woman: all of them engraved in the 20th century traces that cannot be

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erased. The second reason why this series of articles deserves exploration is its language.

Briefness, clear organization and eloquence are the first impressions.

In order to have a holistic look at the genre of biography, we choose to follow the approach

of discourse analysis. Only by using the DA approach can the genre of biography be

comprehensively inspected. Thus we choose the name of the thesis “An Analysis of

Biographical Discourse”.

2. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

The aim of the study is to examine the characteristics of biographical discourse, both at the

holistic and analytic level. The objectives of the study specifically are:

- To investigate the biographical characterization through transitivity and point of

view.

- To frame a template biographical discourse structure

More detailed explication as how the aforementioned objectives have been formulated and

how these objectives can be attained is specified in Chapter 2: Methodology.

3. SCOPE OF THE STUDY

Although we are well aware that the wider the range of biographical data we achieve from,

the more reliable the research results will be. However, within the constraints of time and

resources, the data that we opted for include 30 out of the 100 biographical articles that are

compiled by the TIME ® magazine in 2001 in the serialized “100 Most Important People

of the Century”. Criteria for ensuring the representativeness of the data are as follows:

- biographies of people that have influence in different areas: science, revolution,

innovation, entertainment and philanthropy

- biographies of both male and female personifications of the century

- biographies written by both male and female biographers

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4. METHODOLOGY

We choose the descriptive research approach as it grants permission to our attainment of

the objectives. First of all, the descriptive research is both synthetic (holistic) and analytic

(constituent). This characteristic is in accord with our general research aim: to investigate

the characteristics of biographical discourse both at the macro level and at the constituent

level. Secondly, the descriptive research operates on the basis of hypotheses, thus its

deductive nature. In our study, hypotheses are generated based on previous related research

and careful study on distinguishing features of the biographical genre (see chapter 2 for the

study’s hypotheses). Thirdly, the descriptive study aims to gather data without any

manipulation of the research context, which makes it non-intrusive and deal with naturally

occurring data. Our data are pre-existing as published articles and the preexistent data are

retained without any adjustment of the researcher. Fourthly, the descriptive study’s

subjects can be both treated as individuals and individual variations, enabling the average

behavior for the subjects group. Therefore, each biography in our archive can be explored

in details and variations in the results yielded can be compared and conclusions can be

drawn with regards to the underlying reasons for the differences. Average numerical

results can also be attained to describe the general characteristics of the genre as a whole.

5. ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY

The thesis consists of 3 main parts:

- Part 1 is Introduction, which discusses the rationale, the aims and objectives of the

study, the scope of the study, methodology used in the study and the organization

of the study

- Part 2 is Development, which includes three chapters as follows;

- Chapter 1 - Literature Review: This chapter presents all related theoretical

background that precedes and necessitates the formation of our research

- Chapter 2 - Methodology: This chapter describes the research procedures that

have been utilized in the study

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- Chapter 3 – Data Analysis: This chapter presents and discusses the data

collected and is divided into three major parts: data regarding actions and

events in biographies, point of view in biographies and biographical discourse

structure.

- Part 3 is Conclusion, which summarizes the major findings and implications of the

research and suggestions for further study

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PART 2: DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER 1

LITERATURE REVIEW

In this chapter, a range of fundamental theoretical concepts will be introduced. First of all,

definitions pertaining to what is meant by discourse and discourse analysis, the backbone

concepts of this research paper, are presented in 1.1. as a gateway to the understanding of

the consecutive notions and models. Second, a taxonomy of discourse type is discussed in

1.2. in order to prove that biography is qualified for discourse analysis (henceforth DA).

Third, discussions of methods in DA are included in 1.3. Fourth, in 1.4., theoretical

background regarding definitions of biography, types of biography, the concepts of genre

and style are set forth. Simpson’s model of elements in narrative discourse is discussed in

section 1.5. Halliday’s categorization of Actions and Events is presented in 1.6. Section

1.7. introduces the Leech and Short’s classification of speech and thought, whereas 1.8.

discusses Labov’s model of narrative discuss.

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1.1. DISCOURSE AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

According to Cook (1994), the recent decades have seen a very considerable growth of

interest in discourse analysis. Therefore, the term ‘discourse’ has been widely used by

linguists. Most of them defined discourse as language in its social contexts. For example,

Potter in Wood & Kroger (2000) offers a definition of discourse as text and talks in social

practices. That is, the focus is not on language as an abstract entity such as lexicon and set

of grammatical rules (in linguistics) or a systems of differences (in structuralism). Instead,

language is the medium for interaction; analysis of discourse becomes, then, analysis of

what people do with language. Embedded in Potter’s definition of discourse and discourse

analysis is the assumption of the difference between text and discourse, whereby discourse

is a process or a practice and text (or talk) is the product of that process.

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The aforementioned perspective on discourse and DA stands in correspondence to that of

earlier linguists. Brown & Yule (1983) considers DA the analysis of language in use. As

such, DA cannot be restricted to the description of linguistic forms independent of the

purposes of functions which those forms are designed to serve in human affairs. Cook

(1994) claims that DA has focused very much upon the social nature of communication,

stressing contextual aspects of meaning which are interactive and negotiated, determined

by the social relations and identities of the participants in communication. Halliday, as

cited by Cook (1994), holds the view that language is a social semiotic and believes that

the function of all discourse is a blend of interpersonal and ideational. As in Brown & Yule

(1983), the two corresponding functions of discourse, in their own terms, are interactional

and transactional.

From all the definitions of discourse and DA, an inference can be safely drawn: DA cannot

be restricted to the description of text. However, the linguistic pitfall here may lead to a

DA novice to the conclusion that the descriptive method has been deprived of its import in

DA. According to Coulhart (1994), all branches of linguistics are first and foremost

descriptive. Please note that the descriptive factor of DA does not and should not hinder

the parameter of the area.

1.2. TYPES OF DISCOURSE

There are a number of ways of classifying discourse. As Wood & Kroger (2000) noted, we

can probably agree on the specifications for gross categorizations, for example, written

versus spoken discourse or telephone versus face-to-face talk, and we have no trouble

identifying a particular instance of discourse as a member of such category. The issue will

be less manageable if we notice that the difference between different types of discourse can

be a matter of structure (e.g. of turn-taking, the use of pauses) or a matter of orientation to

power and purpose. Wood & Kroger (2000) also highlights the obscurity of discourse

categorization by the specious dichotomy of monologue and dialogue. They claim that all

discourse are dialogic in nature. In sum, we cannot make statements about forms of

discourse in general in terms of some set of essential properties. Wood & Kroger (2000)

denies the possibility of an exhaustive list of all types of discourse, but proposes a tentative

possible data that DA researcher may draw upon.