Home > Catalogue > Il Tolomeo > 22 | 2020 > Ha Jin’s Ecocritical Irony in the Stylistic Analysis of the Personal Pronouns in “A Tiger Fighter is Hard to Find”

Il Tolomeo | Vol. 22 | December 2020

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Research Article

Ha Jin’s Ecocritical Irony in the Stylistic Analysis of the Personal Pronouns in “A Tiger Fighter is Hard to Find”

Isabella Marinaro    Sapienza Università di Roma, Italia    

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abstract

This paper aims at showing how stylistics and ecocriticism, both being strongly ‘centripetal’ and ‘interdisciplinary’ fields, can cooperate in the exploration of a literary text. This is the case of a short story written by the Chinese-American writer Ha Jin. Also thanks to the help of the digital analysis, the paper mainly focuses on the stylistic analysis of the personal pronouns and of the narrator’s point of view to show the stinging and subversive irony which pervades the narration of the vicissitudes of a Chinese TV film crew who is asked to shoot a scene where a muscular hero has to fight bare-handed against a real Siberian tiger. The analysis also aims to show how the story becomes the opportunity for the writer to depict the narrow frame of mind of the blind dictatorship of his homeland and its deplorable consequences on both humans and animals. Thus, the whole exploration, in the end, reveals the ecocritical lens through which Ha Jin narrates the story.

Published
Dec. 22, 2020
Accepted
Sept. 19, 2020
Submitted
June 30, 2020
Language
EN

Keywords: Ecocriticism • Digital stylistics • Personal pronouns • Ha Jin • Irony

permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/Tol/2499-5975/2020/22/023

Copyright: © 2020 Isabella Marinaro. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.