Dr. Wafa’ Abbas Sahan,
Department of English, Faculty of Education, Al-Zahraa University for Women, Iraq
No text is ideologically free; rather, texts mirror their authors’ thoughts and views. This paper concerns itself with the way ideologies are reflected through the employment of prioritizing as one of the textual-conceptual tools of analysis proposed by Leslie Jeffries (2010). The data selected is war poetry of the modern wars, i.e., post-World War II, such as those that took place in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The data consists of 70 poems written by soldiers, expressing their attitudes towards war. Their words and lines reflect a more reliable portrayal of the battlefield than those poets who rely on their imagination with no direct war experience. The model of analysis adopted is Jeffries Critical Stylistics (2010), with ten tools of analysis; one textual-conceptual tool of analysis, “prioritizing,” is exploited for analysis. The research tries to answer the following questions:
- How can ideologies be reflected through text?
- How can “prioritizing” aid the analyst in tracing the hidden textual ideologies?
- What are the formal linguistic aspects through which ideologies can be extracted?
- What are the hidden ideologies that lie behind the text?
Keywords: Ideology, Critical Stylistics, Prioritizing, War Poetry
The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The Eighth International Conference on Languages, Linguistics, Translation and Literature (WWW.LLLD.IR), 14-15 February 2023, Ahwaz.
