Literature and sociolinguistics. About Hónglóumèng (Dream in the Red Chamber)

This paper considers the possibility of applying the models designed by the Ethnography of Speech to the analysis of literature. First, it reviews the asymmetric relationships that linguistics and Literary Science have maintained over the last century. Linguistics preferred to ignore literature completely. It had the purpose of avoiding any similarity with ancient Philology, from which it tried to differentiate itself. Literary Criticism, however, resorted to linguistically based models, which it applied without difficulty to its priorities of analysis. The situation began to change when M.A.K. Halliday proposed in 1978 the possibility of incorporating literature into the social research of languages. He understood that it had to be taken care of, as the maximum level of elaboration of the language of a society. What is certain is that, since then, the activity of linguistics in this direction has not been abundant either. Some sociolinguists have been among the few interested in developing this line of action. Here we propose to apply the SPEAKING model of speech ethnography and apply it to the analysis of Dream in the Red Pavilion, one of the great classics of world literature