Manipulative strategies of positive/negative presentation in George Orwell’s Animal Farm: a critical discourse analysis

Abstract

This paper presents a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of manipulative strategies of positive/negative presentation in George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1944). The paper’s main objective is to explore the manipulative purposes beyond positive presentation of selfness and negative presentation of otherness in the selected novel. Two research questions are addressed here: first, what are the different strategies of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation encoded in Orwell’s Animal Farm? Second, to what extent are these strategies employed linguistically in the discourse of the novel to manipulate discourse recipients? The analysis covers some CDA strategies, including justification, using false statistics, falsification of history, and competency, for positive self-presentation; and accusation, criticism, using ambiguous words, and recurrent rumors, for negative other-presentation. In so doing, the paper draws on two main approaches: the first is Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1989, 1995; van Dijk, 1993), and the second is van Dijk’s (1997a) model of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation. The paper concludes that through strategies of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation writers/speakers can encode ideologies that aim to influence recipients’ attitudes.