LANGUAGE AND POWER: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF CONTROLLING IDEOLOGY INAYANRAND’S ANTHEM

Abstract

Language is a powerful tool, playing a vital role in our daily life. It controls our thoughts, efforts, emotions and beliefs. Language is also a persuasive tool paying a specific role in controlling people in society. In this novel AnthemAyn Rand established the real setting of Russian politics as she depicted the drawbacks of communism and established the role of language and that how it is used to impose ideology in peaceful and acceptable way. Ideology stands for set of ideas shared by group of people or a society. The supreme ideology of communism is the slogan of “Brotherhood” serving for country in an ultimate duty of every single citizen. Language played a vital role in this book as singular pronouns were replaced with plural pronouns (e.g replacement of “I” with “we” “me” with “us”), showing the ideology of communist state while the language used in the novel doesnot possess singular pronouns, depicting the idea of collective state. In this regard to analyze the language, and how language is used in a social context CDA plays an important role. CDA (Critical discourse analysis) is theory of language and mostly used to analyze political speeches of leaders and ideological contested words are the main focus of this theory. Fairclough’s three dimensional model possesses special quality of analyzing a text. The research is concerned to analyze a text by using  only initial stage (Description stage, textual analysis) here research circle would be only limited to textual analysis, in this stage linguistic features of text are to  be explored. The main focus of research is to find out the hidden ideologies of state and power retaining laws of state.