Discussion date: 10th October 2006
Comment on how information is structured in the following extract, from the beginning of an essay by George Orwell. In your analysis, you should discuss theme and rheme in their relationship to given and new information.
Relevant lecture notes: nos. 15 & 16.
Readings
Before you begin your discussion of the passage below, you may want to consider
the following.
Theme-rheme analysis has been used, among other uses, for second language
instruction; see, for example:
●
Task 12: Theme and Rheme
● Discourse Analysis and Grammar
by Fernando Trujillo
● Textual Organization of
Academic Writing by Duane Leonard & Tiina Hukari
How are considerations found in the above related to the theme-rheme
analysis of literary discourse? The following extract from an essay by George
Orwell may show a relatively good correspondence between theme with
given information, and rheme with new information (except
perhaps for the first paragraph — you need to proffer an explanation if this is
the case). How about literary texts which do not show a relatively neat
corresponding association? Can you give an example (either bring it to class or
pick an example from the Internet)?
1 In time of war the English class system is the enemy
propagandist's best argument. To Dr Goebbels's charge that England is still "two
nations", the only truthful answer would have been that she is in fact three
nations. But the peculiarity of English class distinctions is not that they are
unjust — for after all, wealth and poverty exist side by side in almost all
countries — but that they are anachronistic. They do not exactly correspond to
economic distinctions, and what is essentially an industrial and capitalist
country is haunted by the ghost of a caste system.
2 It is usual to classify modern society under three
headings: the upper class or bourgeoisie, the middle class, or petite
bourgeoisie, and the working class, or proletariat. This roughly fits the facts,
but one can draw no useful inference from it unless one takes account of the
subdivisions within the various classes and realizes how deeply the whole
English outlook is coloured by romanticism and sheer snobbishness.
3 England is one of the last remaining countries to cling to
the outward forms of feudalism. Titles are maintained and new ones are
constantly created, and the House of Lords, consisting mainly of hereditary
peers, has real powers. At the same time England has no real aristocracy. The
race difference on which aristocratic rule is usually founded was disappearing
by the end of the Middle Ages, and the famous medieval families have almost
completely vanished. The so-called old families are those that grew rich in the
sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Moreover, the notion that
nobility exists in its own right, that you can be a nobleman even if you are
poor, was already dying out in the age of Elizabeth, a fact commented on by
Shakespeare. And yet, curiously enough, the English ruling class has never
developed into a bourgeoisie plain and simple. It has never become purely urban
or frankly commercial. The ambition to be a country gentleman, to own and
administer land and draw at least part of your income from rent, has survived
every change. So it comes that each new wave of parvenus, instead of simply
replacing the existing ruling class, has adopted its habits, intermarried with
it, and, after a generation or two, become indistinguishable from it.
4 The basic reason for this may perhaps be that England is
very small and has an equable climate and pleasantly varied scenery. It is
almost impossible in England, and not easy even in Scotland, to be more than
twenty miles from a town. Rural life is less inherently boorish than it is in
bigger countries with colder winters. And the comparative integrity of the
British ruling class — for when all is said and done they have not behaved so
contemptibly as their European opposite numbers — is probably bound up with
their idea of themselves as feudal landowners. This outlook is shared by
considerable sections of the middle class. Nearly everyone who can afford to do
so sets up as a country gentleman, or at least makes some effort in that
direction. The manor-house with its park and its walled gardens reappears in
reduced form in the stockbroker's week-end cottage, in the suburban villa with
its lawn and herbaceous border, perhaps even in the potted nasturtiums on the
window-sill of the Bayswater flat. This wide-spread day-dream is undoubtedly
snobbish, it has tended to stabilize class distinctions and has helped to
prevent the modernization of English agriculture: but it is mixed up with a kind
of idealism, a feeling that style and tradition are more important than money.
Last revised: 10 August 2006.