Language, Power, Politics and Conflict: Issues Pertaining to Language and Identity
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.48165/jes.2025.41.1.5Keywords:
power, language, reality, discourse, dialogismAbstract
Language exercises a power in the very way that it operates. Words are imbued with a strength that has the potential to carry histories and subsequently create futures. Reality is essentially constituted in the symbolic interpretation of this language. This paper endeavors to discuss this feature of language paying close attention to its facets which serve to influence the creation and circulation of reality that is fundamentally biased. It examines the creation of binaries in this system of discourse which is the primary means through which it demarcates reality and constructs identities. The paper, also, further, looks into the different dimensions of power exercised by language, and scrutinizes the multiple voices housed in a text.
Downloads
References
Abrams, M.H. 2012. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Cengage, New Delhi
Bakhtin M. M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (Caryl Emerson, Trans.) University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published in 1963)
Bakhtin, M. M. (1968). Rabelais And His World (Helene Iswolsky, Trans.) M.I.T. Press Cambridge, Mass (Original work published in 1965)
Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale UP, 1979.
Kadt, Elizabeth. (1991). Language, Power and Emancipation: A South-African Perspective. Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory (Vol. 78) Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/41801934.
Macherey, Pierre. (2012). A Theory of Literary Production. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Nahrkhalaji, Saeedeh Shafiee. (2011). Language, Ideology and Power: a Critical Approach to Political Discourse. Retrieved from https://research.iaun.ac.ir/pd/shafiee-nahrkhalajiold/pdfs/PaperC_9003.pdf
Nayar, Pramod. (2010). Literary And Cultural Theory From Structuralism To Ecocriticism. Pearson, New Delhi
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988). Can the Subaltern Speak? Die Philosophin 14 (27):42-58.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Journal of Extension Systems

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.