Cohesive harmony and theme in Peter Carey’s ‘The last days of a famous mime’

Abstract

Peter Carey’s ‘The last days of a famous mime’ is a short story that presents interpretative challenges. It hangs together as a text, but this coherence is minimal and has an important rhetorical effect that draws attention to the story’s literary meaning. This effect becomes the departure point for a linguistic analysis of the text, which aims to guide an interpretation of the story by focusing on the ways in which textual meanings are construed. Drawing on the systemic functional model of language, the text is analysed from the angles of cohesive harmony and theme. The analysis highlights a low degree of coherence as a central meaning, both at the level of discourse and within the fictional world. This finding leads to the interpretation of the text as a statement on the importance of social and emotional validation.

Keywords

cohesion coherence cohesive harmony interpretation Peter Carey stylistics ‘The last days of a famous mime’theme

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Björklund

Virtanen

(1991) Variation in narrative structure: A simple text vs. an innovative work of art. Poetics 20(4): 391–403.

Bloor

(2004) The Functional Analysis of English. London: Arnold.

Butt

(1983) Semantic drift in verbal art. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 6(1): 38–48.

Carey

(1981) Author’s statements [Peter Carey]. Australian Literary Studies 10(2): 191–193.

Carey

(1994) Collected Stories. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.

Fries

(1981) On the status of theme in English: Arguments from discourse. Forum Linguisticum 6(1): 1–38.

Halliday

Hasan

(1976) Cohesion in English. Essex: Pearson Education.

Halliday

Matthiessen

(2014) Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar. Milton Park: Routledge.

Hasan

(1984) Coherence and cohesive harmony. In: Flood

(ed.) Understanding Reading Comprehension: Cognition, Language and the Structure of Prose. Newark: International Reading Association, pp.181–219.

10.

Hasan

(1985a) Linguistics, Language, and Verbal Art. Geelong: Deakin University Press.

11.

Hasan

(1985b) The texture of a text. In: Halliday

Hasan

(eds) Language, Context, and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective. Deakin University: Deakin University Press, pp.70–96.

12.

Hasan

Fries

(1995) Reflections on subject and theme: An introduction. In: Hasan

Fries

(eds) On Subject and Theme: A Discourse Functional Perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp.xiii–xlv.

13.

Hassall

(1994) Dancing on Hot Macadam: Peter Carey’s Fiction. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.

14.

Leech

Short

(2007) Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. New York: Longman Group Ltd.

15.

Ryan-Fazilleau

(1991) One-upmanship in Peter Carey’s short stories. Journal of the Short Story in English=Les Cahiers de la Nouvelle: 51–63.

16.

Snodgrass

(2010) Peter Carey: A Literary Companion. Jefferson: McFarland and Company.

17.

Thompson

(2004) Introducing Functional Grammar. London: Hodder Education.

18.

Toolan

(1990) The Stylistics of Fiction: A Literary-Linguistic Approach. London: Routledge.

19.

Waugh

(1984) Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London: Methuen.