Freedom in Exile: A Linguistic-discursive Analysis of the Representations of the China x Tibet Conflict in the 14th Dalai Lama’s Autobiography

Abstract

This article is part of an undergraduate course paper that studies the autobiography of the 14^th Dalai Lama of Tibet, Tenzin Gyatso: Freedom in Exile. We analyse the discursive-linguistic representations of the conflict between China and Tibet within this autobiographical narrative through systemic functional linguistics. We understand the potential of the autobiographical narrative as a means to construe and organize life experiences through language and also giving new meanings to them. In this study we employ the theoretical and methodological apparatus of critical discourse analysis and the philosophy of critical realism in the attempt to understand the representational aspect of the texts. We use a qualitative research approach. The general objective of this study is to analyse the representations that the narrator creates of the contents of his vital experience by privileging and working with the ones that emerge from the conflict between China and Tibet. The specific objectives include: (i) to identify the lexical-grammatical choices regarding the constituents that structure these representations; (ii) to explore autobiographical writing; (iii) to analyse the representations discursively, in order to proceed to an explanatory critique of the discourse; (iv) to discuss and reflect upon the intransitivity of moral values to human emancipation and meta-Reality.