Linguistic Dominance in Miller's Death of a Salesman and Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire

Abstract

This study adopts the critical discourse analysis to put it into effect through applying Fairclough's (1992) model. Such a model aims to "show up connections which may be hidden from people such as the connections between language and power" (Fairclough, 1989, p.5). The researcher exploits the CDA approach so as to be able to expose the dominant social issues such as domination, inequality, exploitation, group superiority and ethnicity. It has considered, in a collective way, the means through which the linguistic dominance is constructed, situated and oriented to action. In the sense that how interlocutors construct and orient to dominance in their talk and how the practices of dominance constitute the discursive activities with a specific concern for issues like domestic violence, unequal power relations, gender, ideology, social identities and status. Fairclough's model expects to prove advantageous for the study of discourse in general and to add more insights into this study and enhance our understanding of the chosen literary works of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Through this approaches, the controlling ideas and issues that are common in the American society after the Second World War as well as the destructive shift of the industrial society become evident. This shift has American dreams of success and social equality. So, the following section summarizes the achievements of application this model to the two dramatic works of Death of a Salesman and A Street Car Named Desire. One point worth emphasizing is that the analysis undertaken here is not only interpersonal (non-cognitivist) but also ideational (mental cognition). Namely, the focus is on the conversational and interactional tools such as the right to addition to that, there are other discourse social role