The Discourse of Clinical Authority in Bloodstream: Professional Voice, Diagnostic Uncertainty, and the Production of Dread
學年 114
學期 2
出版（發表）日期 2026-06-30
作品名稱 The Discourse of Clinical Authority in Bloodstream: Professional Voice, Diagnostic Uncertainty, and the Production of Dread
作品名稱（其他語言）
著者 Chia-Hung Lin
單位
出版者
著錄名稱、卷期、頁數 Journal of Applied English 20, p.67-102
摘要 This article presents a scene-based discourse analysis of Tess Gerritsen's medical thriller Bloodstream (1998), examining how clinical authority is linguistically enacted, challenged, and repaired under diagnostic uncertainty and intensifying public fear. Integrating appraisal theory (Martin & White, 2005), stance and modality analysis, and critical discourse analysis, the study analyzes six focal scenes and an excerpt inventory that includes contextual and lexical anchors. The article asks how the novel constructs (i) professional voice and diagnostic authority, (ii) uncertainty management through epistemic and deontic modality, and (iii) dread through evaluative language, escalation, and public blame. The analysis shows that Bloodstream represents authority not as a stable attribute attached to professional role, but as an interactional achievement dependent on uptake. It also shows that uncertainty is communicatively double-edged: cautious, evidence-responsive positioning can index epistemic responsibility, yet in crisis settings it may be re-heard as weakness, indecision, or evasion. Finally, the novel produces dread through patterned Affect, negative Appreciation, cumulative intensification, and the circulation of rumor, thereby reshaping how expert discourse is received. By bringing empirical scholarship on medical discourse, uncertainty communication, and crisis discourse into dialogue with literary analysis, the article demonstrates how medical-thriller fiction can function as a pedagogically useful site for ESP/EAP work on communicating risk, uncertainty, and reassurance. It concludes by proposing a reusable classroom coding worksheet, a sample lesson sequence, and assessment criteria for stance-rewriting, register-translation, appraisal-mapping, and public-warning tasks.
關鍵字 appraisal theory; clinical authority; diagnostic uncertainty; stance; crisis discourse; ESP/EAP pedagogy
語言 zh_TW
ISSN
期刊性質 國內
收錄於 Airiti Library Taiwan
產學合作
通訊作者
審稿制度 是
國別 TWN
公開徵稿
出版型式 ,電子版
相關連結

機構典藏連結 ( http://tkuir.lib.tku.edu.tw:8080/dspace/handle/987654321/129624 )