The Role of Language in the Projection of Ideological Power in the Selected Works of Cowell and Paolini: Fairclough’s CDA Approach[Latin Thesis]

Fatemeh Bajelani

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a new approach in the discourse analysis, which is broadly used in a lot of researches in literature. Children’s literature can be interpreted through CDA approach and linguistic criticism to show the correlation of language, power, and ideology. This study aims to investigate the correlation of the ideological power presented in the Cressida Cowell’s How to Train Your Dragon?, How to Be a Pirate?, and How to Speak Dragonese? and Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Trilogy (Eragon, Eldst, and Brisingr). In this way, the researcher used Norman Fairclough’s CDA and the texts are analyzed through the three stages of description, interpretation, and explanation. In the description level, it is concentrated on the vocabulary selection, structures of the texts, and figure of speech used in the novels that show the ideological viewpoint of the authors. In the interpretation level, the meaning of the constituent parts of the novels is examined in an intertextual content. The semantic aspects of the interpreter’s background knowledge or member’s resource (MR) within them are drawn upon, too. In the explanation level, the text has reproduced the texts to portray the ideological power discourse as a part of a social process the author is connected to. As everybody think, children’s literature is not totally innocent of ideology and it is not completely didactic, moral and educational. Like in the other branches of literature, in children’s literature, ideology is hidden between the lines and the notion of power has been implanted in every word.