Year: 2018
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This thesis is in two parts. The first is a critical analysis of the use of dialect as unheimlich \nin British writing. Using Freud’s essay, The Uncanny (1919), as its basis, this thesis will \nargue that the use of dialect creates tension within a text between the representation of \nhome, and of that which may be considered unhomely. Reading a range of British texts \npsychoanalytically alongside sociolinguistic studies, this thesis seeks to show how an \nauthor’s choice of dialect-use within their literary form is bound up with an unheimlich \nmind-set of dialect within both writer and reader, whilst considering the cultural and \nhistorical contexts in which these attitudes are based. A range of unheimlich notions may \nbe read from dialect, and its use is to be repressed or rejected as abject and replaced with \nthe more accessible standard English associated with education, adulthood, civilisation and \npower. Yet it might also be read that, through standard English, the ‘strange’ has been \nbrought into our homes and our mouths, made familiar through the hegemonic \nappropriation of the ‘mother tongue’. Whilst the hearing of spoken accents and dialects \nwithin various medias has become increasingly common, negative connotations remain, \nespecially when presented in the written form; what might be familiar to the ear remains \nstrange to the eye. Its use divides readers as to its necessity and desirability, suggesting \nthere is a long way to go before dialects are accepted fully in literary terms. Yet it remains \nan important aesthetic tool for the writer, and its continued use suggests the need or desire \nto represent in writing the many individual ways of speaking, and so too a sense of place, \nperson, home, and familiarity, within the text. That writers appear to uphold associated \nconnotations of maleness, or of undesirable, regressive human traits through dialect, \nhowever, suggests that embedded inequalities persist and so too the unheimlich qualities of \ndialect. \nThe second part is a literary novel, exploring lives in a post-apocalyptic matriarchal \nsociety, set in Yorkshire, in which dialect and who is speaking play a discernible role.
Author: Catherine Morris
Language: English
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2943364841