Character’s Exclusion and Inclusion Representations in Sinan Antoon's 'The Corpse Washer'

Abstract

The current study is an attempt to demonstrate how characters are represented in Sinan Antoon’s Self-translated novel ‘The Corpse Washer’. The study adopts a Critical Discourse Analysis framework to analyse major characters' utterances through the use of van Leeuwen's socio-semantic Model ‘Social Actor Representation’. The linguistic analysis of characters' utterances aims at analysing the active and passive representation within the novel as well as the character’s importance by tracking the frequency of representation. The main aim of this study is to check the applicability of Social actor representation to literary social actors within novels since previous studies used this model to analyse non-fictional social actors. The result shows that the characters are included more than excluded and activated more than passivated due to the characters of the novel. Moreover, the chosen model for this study shows its effectiveness in analysing the selected data.