Яшил иқтисодиёт ва тараққиёт Volume 4 Issue 7 (2026) · pp. 182-187
DEPICTING SOCIAL INEQUALITY THROUGH LITERARY DISCOURSE: (on the Example of Kecha va kunduz and An American Tragedy)
Утемуратова, Бибихон
Abstract
This article studies how novels depict social inequality through language. It compares Cho‘lpon’s Kecha va kunduz (Night and Day, 1936) with Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925). The two works come from very different societies — late-colonial Turkestan and industrial America — yet both tell the story of a powerless person destroyed by a social order, and both end in a courtroom. The analysis uses critical discourse analysis, Halliday’s transitivity system and Bakhtin’s idea of heteroglossia. Four features are compared: how social power is named, who is given or denied agency in the sentence, how a poor woman becomes the victim of the plot, and how legal discourse speaks the final word. Dreiser presents inequality as an economic mechanism of desire and money that turns a young man into an offender and a working girl into a corpse. Cho‘lpon presents inequality as a chain of patriarchal, class and colonial power that silences a young woman completely. The study concludes that inequality in world literature is determined by form as well as by theme, and it discusses what this means for English–Uzbek literary translation.
literary discourse, social inequality, critical discourse analysis, comparative analysis, transitivity, voice, Cho‘lpon, Dreiser, English–Uzbek translation
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