Abstract
In this chapter, several pieces of protest prose, condemnations of the Totonicapán Massacre in Guatemala and the Diary of Bobby Sands from Northern Ireland, are examined within the deep stories of their particular production contexts of the electricity protests and “The Troubles”, respectively. Each piece of prose is then analyzed as a performative within the framework of the renovated felicity conditions, introduced in Chapter 2 based on Austin’s Speech Act Theory, for the speech act of protest. Each analysis focuses on the presuppositional conditions regarding convention, circumstance, words, persons, effects, and positionings, followed by the aspirational conditions with a focus on thoughts, intention, risk, commitment, and subsequent actions. These analyses include discussions of identity in terms of convocativity as well as how these speech acts attain pragmatic legitimacy through the fulfillment of the felicity conditions.
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Gasaway Hill, M.L. (2018). Exploring the Protest Language of Prose: Condemnations of the Totonicapán Massacre and The Diary of Bobby Sands. In: The Language of Protest. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77419-0_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77419-0_6
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