Reflection and Dialogism as Discourse Markers of Iris Murdoch’s Philosophical Prose

Abstract

The article explores the literary-philosophical discourse of Iris Murdoch’s texts with regard to its narrative specificity and genre modification. The genre specifics of her novels are examined in the historical and cultural retrospective, with the emphasis on their discourse markers. Previous research indicates that this aspect of her philosophical novel poetics remains insufficiently studied. The paper aims to examine the discourse of Murdoch’s prose within theoretical-historical context, considering its main markers as reflection and dialogism. The discourse analysis basically employs a qualitative methodology that includes the integrative approach comprising the fundamentals of historical poetics, genre study, narratology, receptive poetics and transitivity theory. The findings support the idea that the analysis of dialogues (conversations) in close rereading of Murdoch’s texts contributes to the insight of her philosophical prose dynamic nature due to the specific patterns of complex interplay of voices in her writings (novels, philosophical dialogues). Consequently, we find that the phenomenon of universal dialogism in Murdoch’s prose appears to be qualitatively diverse: ‘dialogic protagonist’, plot dialogism, dialogues with the reader, reflections of characters, discussions on various issues of philosophy, religion, being, morality, etc. Overall, reception links of Murdoch’s philosophical essays and her novels are traced and analysed within the broad context of European literary-philosophical reflection.