Mindstyle in To Kill a Mockingbird: a functional analysis of language

Abstract

In recent years, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and its moral hero Atticus Finch faced criticism for their represented racial liberalism contrary to the massive popularity received in earlier years of novel’s publication. Recent criticism raises on apology for the novel’s white paternalism and, failure to address and disrupt the systematic structures that enact racism. Following the model of Halliday’s thematic analysis through transitivity patterns in Golding’s The Inheritors, this thesis will conduct a stylistic analysis of TKMB to analyse the moral viewpoint as encoded by the linguistic structure of the text. This thesis will identify two patterns, first, some structural techniques as the use of dialogues, provocations, episodic events, and narrative point of view to foreground Atticus Finch as the moral centre of the novel. Secondly, the lexicogrammatical patterns, as explored by detailed transitivity analysis, using projections, attributions, dense nominal groups, and grammatical abstractions shape a moral view of the world in which structures that sustain white power and enact racism are left uncritiqued and undisturbed.

Date of Thesis submission	2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Western Sydney University
Supervisor	David McInnes (Supervisor) & Chris Conti (Supervisor)