Ruqaiya Hasan

This thesis is an investigation into the style of one of Australia’s greatest contemporary literary exports: Peter Carey. Carey is an acclaimed writer of fiction and is best known as an award-winning novelist, but before his first novel was published in the 1970s, he achieved international recognition as a writer of short stories. The stories were received well by critics, but were largely overshadowed by his subsequent novels. Although a considerable amount of critical attention has been paid to his stories over the years, there still remains much to say about their style and meaning: namely the ways in which their imaginative, anti-realist devices articulate fictional truth. Taking as my point of departure the insights and opinions of traditional literary critics, I argue that Carey’s short stories, as seen through the lens of social-semiotic stylistics, articulate a special form of truth which provokes the reader to imagine new possibilities. This questioning of reality is shown to be a central preoccupation in his stories by using a variety of linguistic methods to make explicit their verbal texture.

This paper has two goals, distinct but linked. The first goal, as the title suggests, is to remember the work of the late thinker, writer, and linguist Ruqaiya Hasan (1931-2015) in just the way she herself would have had it remembered: in the form of a short, practical manual of her method of linguistic analysis. This is based on the work of her teacher Basil Bernstein and her co-thinker and companion, M.A.K. Halliday. The second goal is to link this manual and this analysis to a kind of manifesto of her ideal of human progress. This progress is always revolutionary, i.e. crisis-ridden and critical, and it takes place on three timescales: the long-term sociological, the mid-term child-developmental, and the short-term textual. The link between the two goals of this paper is a defense of Hasan's legacy against criticisms that her work is essentialist, elitist and easily weaponized and turned against against the daughters and sons of working people. Hasan's work may be ignored; but, without first disabling its comprehension, it cannot be so compromised. In a 2007 paper, Ruqaiya Hasan recalled a British Marxist remarking, sometime in the early forties, that the key problem of capitalist education lies in creating a system that will somehow enable the operation of a Bren light machine gun but disable the comprehension of the Communist Manifesto. As a sociolinguist, she thought of problems in three overlapping timescales-the sociogenetic (the cultural-historical timescale spanning millennia, centuries and decades), the ontogenetic (the child-developmental timescale spanning decades, years and months), and the 'logogenetic' (the timescale of making meaning in an oral or written text over years, months, and even classroom moments). On the sociogenetic timescale, the problem was one of forming a whole class capable of producing surplus value and reproducing cannon fodder but incapable of the awareness of being made to do so. On the ontogenetic timescale, the problem was one of training individual children to be capable soldiers without educating any working-class intellectuals. On the logogenetic timescale, the problem was one of forging a register of language that cements technical skills as habits but consistently stops these habits short of developing into

This is a somewhat earlier draft of a paper that will soon appear in Language and Education. For the full version, see:

DOI:
10.1080/09500782.2017.1306074

There are (apparently) fifty free copies available here:

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/8Vaq4HpJMi55DzsAyFCf/full

I actually prefer the chatty earlier version, but the reviewers wanted something a little more IMRAD (Intro-Method-Result And Discussion).

This thesis is an investigation into the style of one of Australia’s greatest contemporary literary exports: Peter Carey. Carey is an acclaimed writer of fiction and is best known as an award-winning novelist, but before his first novel was published in the 1970s, he achieved international recognition as a writer of short stories. The stories were received well by critics, but were largely overshadowed by his subsequent novels. Although a considerable amount of critical attention has been paid to his stories over the years, there still remains much to say about their style and meaning: namely the ways in which their imaginative, anti-realist devices articulate fictional truth. Taking as my point of departure the insights and opinions of traditional literary critics, I argue that Carey’s short stories, as seen through the lens of social-semiotic stylistics, articulate a special form of truth which provokes the reader to imagine new possibilities. This questioning of reality is shown to be a central preoccupation in his stories by using a variety of linguistic methods to make explicit their verbal texture.