Prioritizing and Ideological Reflections: A Critical Stylistic Study

No text is ideologically free; rather, texts mirror their authors' thoughts and views. This paperconcerns itself with the way ideologies are reflected through the employment of prioritizingas one of the textual-conceptual tools of analysis proposed by Leslie Jeffries (۲۰۱۰). Thedata selected is war poetry of the modern wars, i.e., post-World War II, such as those thattook place in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The data consists of ۷۰ poems written bysoldiers, expressing their attitudes towards war. Their words and lines reflect a more reliableportrayal of the battlefield than those poets who rely on their imagination with no direct warexperience. The model of analysis adopted is Jeffries Critical Stylistics (۲۰۱۰), with ten toolsof analysis; one textual-conceptual tool of analysis, “prioritizing,” is exploited for analysis.The research tries to answer the following questions:۱. How can ideologies be reflected through text?۲. How can “prioritizing” aid the analyst in tracing the hidden textual ideologies?۳. What are the formal linguistic aspects through which ideologies can be extracted?۴. What are the hidden ideologies that lie behind the text?

Keywords:

Ideology , Critical Stylistics , Prioritizing , War Poetry