ABSTRACT
Over the last ten years, Roger Fowler has been a consistent advocate of the ideological analysis of literary (and non-literary) texts: in other words, an analysis of the systems of values and beliefs underlying the texts.1 In the preceding chapter, he follows the Russian theorist Bakhtin, and maintains that opposing voices in a text embody conflicting world-views or ideologies. At the same time he has reinterpreted Bakhtin’s findings in a stricter way within Halliday’s social-semiotic framework. This has led to the development of Fowler’s sociolinguistic functionalism, his ‘theory of literature as social discourse’ or simply, to quote the title of his recent book (Fowler, 1986), ‘linguistic criticism’. Its practitioner studies a literary text as a communicative event, not as an autonomous verbal artefact. He is interested in the relationships between author, narrator, characters and reader: hence, he is particularly interested in interpersonal features of language (Fowler 1981:175). And the most important interpersonal feature of language is modality, which is defined in a broad sense as follows:
Modality covers all those features of discourse which concern a speaker’s or writer’s attitude to, or commitment to, the value of applicability of the propositional content of an utterance, and concomitantly, his relationship with whoever he directs the speech act to. (Fowler 1977:13).
