Discursive Strategies Representing Ideology and Social Power in Stokett’s The Help: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Writers of literary texts rely on multiple linguistic methods and structures, explicitly or implicitly, to reveal their ideas. This study tends to uncover the discursive strategies employed in Stockett’s The Help from a Critical Discourse Analysis perspective. The current study aims to: 1) Showing the discursive strategies in the novel under study. 2) Pinpointing the discursive strategies employed in revealing ideologies in the novel under investigation. 3) Finding out the discursive strategies used in revealing social power in the novel under study.

A number of texts that contain various discursive strategies have been selected for analysis. To fulfill the above aims, the study hypothesizes that: 1) certain discursive strategies are used in the novel under investigation, 2) in terms of the discursive strategies used in the novel under study, some are resorted to more than others, and 3) some ideologies and social power are more commonly revealed than others by way of certain discursive strategies. The novel is analyzed discursively within Fairclough's approach (2001).The most important conclusions, the study has come up are: 1) the discursive strategies employed in the novel under investigation are: presupposition, intertextuality and speech acts, 2) the most commonly discursive strategy by which ideologies are revealed in the novel is intertextuality.