Title: Genre Analysis of Hiroshima A-bomb Survivors’ Stories: Linguistic Insights on Historical Writing for Peace Education
Stream: Education, Sustainability & Society: Social Justice, Development & Political Movements
Presentation Type: Live-Stream Presentation
Authors:
Tingjia Wang, Hiroshima University, Japan
Abstract:
Since June 2011, The Chugoku Shimbun, the local, dominant news publisher in Hiroshima, Japan, started to interview and publish Hiroshima A-bomb survivors’ stories in both Japanese and English on its affiliated website The Chugoku Shimbun Hiroshima Peace Media Center. The website currently has 154 survivors’ stories in English between 2011 and 2021, forming the largest digital archive of Hiroshima A-bomb survivors’ testimonies accessible to English readers worldwide. Using this data, this research aims to explore the discourse structure of Hiroshima A-bomb survivors’ stories from the perspective of genre theory within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) framework. Key findings suggest that these survivors’ stories have instantiated a new, hybrid genre consists of a history genre (typically Biographical Recount) and a story genre (typically Observation). In this presentation, I will illustrate this hybrid genre and discuss three key linguistic features: the communicative purpose, the SFL generic structure, and the most outstanding discursive pattern (the attitudinal prosody in particular) emerging from three example stories published in 2021, 2016, and 2015 respectively. Findings of this research will demonstrate the power of linguistic choices at different levels in peace-building and provide significant suggestions for Peace Education, historical writing in particular. Findings of this research will explain how to reframe a spoken Personal Recount into a written sequence of Biographical Recount Observation from the linguistic perspective. That is, this research will suggest how to construct the shared, communal memory of a historical event and the public peace culture of a city by individual survivors’ personal memories.
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