Narrative features of 12 klondike stories by Jack London : semiodiscursive and textual approach

The present piece of research is concerned with 12 Northern stories written by the American writer Jack London. Its goal is to apply discourse analysis as a framework to the study of narrative texts in order to find out the discursive strategies that are specific for these stories. These twelve short stories about the Klondike and the gold rush were considered to be representative in relation to the nature of this research. In the analysis of the twelve stories chosen for the corpus, the theoretical framework used is based on different linguistic trends and theories currently developing in France, Great Britain, Russia, Spain and the United States. They concern discourse linguistics, narratology and poetics. The present research has four main steps: (1) describing the peculiar characteristics of the plots; (2) showing how London creates his very special narrative world; (3) revealing the polyphonic character of these stories by distinguishing different voices through the one of the narrator and the voices of the characters; this aspect of the analysis allows us to see how these voices sound, in order to configure a world of representations; (4) studying how the writer creates certain particular effects by the use of rhetorical sets. The analysis of the linguistic features of the stories provides essential information concerning the discursive strategies and the general configuration of the twelve stories in the corpus. The conclusions demonstrate the main features of the analysed narrative texts, such as their heterogeneity in their different narrative levels; its polyphony at the enunciative level; its expressive laconism at the stylistic level; and, especially, at the level of interpretation, the proposal of an ethics of action. ; En este trabajo de investigación exploramos doce cuentos del escritor americano Jack London. Nuestro objetivo es la aplicación del marco teórico del análisis del discurso a estos textos narrativos para poner de manifiesto sus estrategias discursivas. Hemos escogido estos doce cuentos ...