A glimpse of the exploitation of africa in joseph conrad's “heart of darkness” : the use of halliday's transitivity analysis in unraveling ideologies

Abstract EN

In the colonial period, the African nations witnessed tremendous massacres from the elites.

They endured great suffering in terms of oppression and racism, and their identity was fading and westernized coercively.

In the post-colonial period, the imperialists' acts and their exploitation of Africa were portrayed in different literary works to shed light on concealed facts and describe the brutal situation and chaos of the Africans at that time.

Joseph Conrad's “Heart of Darkness” was one of the most conspicuous literary pieces on that topic.

It described the cruelty of colonialism and the intensity of racism with leaving opposing and contentious opinions towards the real position of the writer in the topic of imperialism.

The writer used a myriad of linguistic structures to reveal his intentions and describe the different events of the story.

Therefore, the ideology of the writer can be detected by analyzing his linguistic choices.

The functionalist stylistic came up with different strategies of analyzing literary discourse through describing the linguistic choices.

Transitivity is among the most used ones in literary discourse.

This paper deals with applying Halliday's transitivity strategy to analyze a literary excerpt from Joseph Conrad's “Heart of Darkness”.

It attempts to detect the author's ideology towards imperialism and racism in Africa with bearing upon the language used in the discourse.

The results revealed that Conrad was only stating the bitter truth by unveiling the real identity of the imperialists and depicting the suffering of the colonized people.

As implications, it was suggested to implement transitivity in teaching literature as a stepping stone in literary discourse analysis to facilitate the students' readability of different texts and trigger their critical thinking skills.