Abstract
With the challenges of the 21 st century, there seems to be an urgent need to reflect more on the way literature constructs the world for the sensitive age group of young adults. In this vein, the present paper is an attempt to investigate the way time, place and society are linguistically portrayed for young adults in the interesting literary genre of dystopia science fiction. This attempt is the track that the paper pursues to find out why and how the young adult readers get so indulged with the world of dystopia science fiction. The young adult seems to reconstruct the dystopic science fiction temporal, special and social atmosphere with the aid of language. Thus, there must be a certain linguistic structure for the construction of the three vital elements of the world (time, place and society) in this literary genre. To achieve its aims, the paper combines the concept of deixis with Werth’s (1999) Text World Theory. For more precise results, the corpus linguistics tools of concordance and frequency are employed by using Anthony’s (2019) AntConc software. The data consists of eight young adult dystopia science fiction works; Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games Trilogy (2008-2010) (a series of three novels) and James Dashner’s The Maze Runner (2009- 2016) (a series of five novels). Keywords: corpus linguistics; deixis; dystopia; science fiction; Text World Theory
Highlights
The term dystopia is a coinage of John Stuart Mill in 1868 from the Greek dis topos which means a bad place
There has been heavy reliance on the present simple in particular (Table2, Figures 9 and 10). This fact explains the linguistic features employed in the text to keep the readers occupied with the current state of events and help building the discourse world that the Text World Theory (TWT) proposed to imitate the context of the story
Deixis contributes to the contemplation associated with reading dystopic fiction through creating a discourse world by focusing on the most suitable linguistic variables that simulate the dystopic context
Summary
The term dystopia is a coinage of John Stuart Mill in 1868 from the Greek dis topos which means a bad place. American dystopia could affect the readers through two phenomena: ‘the analogous historical tendencies’ and ‘the popular literary tradition of utopia fiction’ Dystopia is anti- utopia in the sense that it refers to an imaginary world where people experience unpleasant, indecent, unsafe, and improper life (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). Dystopia is a kind of criticism since it describes an imaginary society in particular time and place that are worse than the readers’ are. Dystopia writers present the society as ‘an imaginary oppressive society’ that is dominated by the elite. It is a paradoxical society in which, people are in conflict with each other and need each other at the same time It is a paradoxical society in which, people are in conflict with each other and need each other at the same time (Zirange, 2013, p. 89)
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