The discourse construction of the image of Russia in the British and American press in the year 2005. A contrastive study. (original) (raw)

2022, Doctoral Thesis by Miglar Chávez Solenova

Linguistic expression and communication play a crucial role when it comes to understanding an image of a specific country, as well as the construction and interpretation of such image. The main goal in the present thesis is to carry out a contrastive study through the analysis of Russia’s image construction as a threat in the newspaper articles from the British press The Guardian and the American press The New York Times. This study focuses on the contrastive written discourse for the analysis of the texts which includes Russia, Great Britain and the United States as the main actors in the frame of International Relations in the year 2005. For the development of the aforementioned contrastive study, a general theoretical approach will be introduced to the concept of image applied to Russia, in order to understand how Russia’s complex historical evolution as a nation has configured the Western representations of Russia and its image from a historical, socio-political and ideological points of view. Additionally, there will be a more specific section focused on the historical configuration of the British and American perception of the image of Russia. This will help us understand how the views of these countries towards Russia are reflected in the British and American press articles. All this is closely related to the stereotypes, which constitute a direct consequence of the innumerable differences that Russia has been manifesting throughout its historical evolution with respect to the Western world. As will be seen, this fact highlights even more Russia’s anti-Western character. The next step will be to describe how such representations are reflected in the texts from the British and American digital press from a linguistic perspective. For the discussion of the perception and interpretation of Russia’s image as a threat, a special attention will be given to the concept of framing in relation to influence, persuasion, propaganda and manipulation of the news content. This stresses the high degree of criticism towards Russia from an ideological perspective. Such criticism is especially outstanding in the newspaper articles from the American press The New York Times. From a methodological perspective, the thesis presents a detailed description of the corpus structuring of the articles from The Guardian and The New York Times, including the discussion of the quantification results from the data samples, reflecting the thematic relevance linked to the image of Russia. This relevance manifests Russia’s threatening character projected mainly from the socio-economic and political spheres, with an emphasised criticism towards Russia as a nuclear threat, and also towards its historical past under the old communist regime. A detailed description of the structuring of the British and American digital press is followed, with the incorporation of quantification results, and the analysis of the terms semantically related to the concept of threat. This analysis includes a series of examples taken from the press articles reflecting the image of Russia as a threat to democratic values, and also as a military, nuclear, ideological, imperialist, personalized, and domestic threat. The analysis is developed through the use of the different lexical-semantic and stylistic rhetorical features portraying Russia’s image as a threatening country to the West in the newspaper articles from the British and American digital press. The linguistic analysing criteria are based on the models of the authors Fairclough and van Dijk. The thesis concludes with final reflections on the perception of Russia by Great Britain and the United States, stressing the fact that Russia’s unique and peculiar character makes it very difficult for these Western countries to change their perception of Russia and accept it as it is. This is mainly due to Russia’s historical past marked by a repressive communist ideology, as well as the authoritarian character in the figure of the Russian president Vladimir Putin. Key words: Russia, history, stereotype, discourse, framing, threat, Communism, Putin’s authoritarianism.