Conversational Maxims and Moments of Physical Violence in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger

ABSTRACT It is crucial to use language effectively in dramatic texts to communicate a central idea to the audience or reader. Based on the premise that each writer has his/her own unique style, stylistics, which encapsulates many subfields and areas of research, appears as a cardinal method of criticism that allows analysing an author’s style by utilising the possibilities and elements of linguistics. The present study examines how language is used in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger to depict the theme of violence, a prominent aspect of Kitchen Sink Drama, which is grounded in realism. The analysis approaches the selected dialogues from the play through the lens of stylistic theories, specifically focusing on scrutinising them with the Cooperative Principle (CP) that targets cooperation in the structure of a proper dialogue for sound conversation. Therefore, applying CP theory to selected parts of drama texts effectively provides a deeper understanding of dialogues in the literature. The primary objective of this study is to illustrate that the multiple imbalanced uses of maxims in the dialogues may result in flawed or disrupted communication. This is exemplified through the selected excerpts from Look Back in Anger, a Kitchen Sink Drama in which Osborne’s protagonist represents the Angry Young Men generation in British society. In this context, the study demonstrates that in the analysed dialogues, instances where one of the speakers perceives verbal communication as ineffective and dysfunctional may lead to misunderstandings, communicative breakdowns, and, at times, physical violence, which is identified in the study as a “Non-verbal Act.”