Discourse and Ideology

According to the discoursal trends in linguistics, no use of language is truly value-free. This work is an attempt to illuminate the ideological patterns underlying the modernist approaches to the study of literature that have emerged in the wake of linguistics and linguistic account of literature. The researchers with their own inclination towards postmodernism found the application of Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) as a tool to the "analysis" of the collected data quite illuminating. This application not only led to the illumination of both evaluative linguistic items and specific discursive strategies creating positive attitudes in the related texts towards such approaches but also shed light on the negative aspect of the approaches reflected through the analysis of modernist themes of centralism, systematization, domination, generalization, reductionism and scientism. This eventually led the researchers to shed doubt on the claims for the value of scientificity in solely linguistic approaches to literature.