Representation of inequality in Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: A critical discourse analysis
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Department of English
Abstract
This thesis primarily examines Arundhati Roy's novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, with special attention to its various socio-political issues and its direct relation to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). CDA, as it is connected with those issues, this paper brings and applies the concept CDA particularly focusing on assuming and implying, naming and describing, prioritizing and negating as the tools to examine the novel and different aspects of CDA forwarded by two prominent scholars of CDA, Norman Fairclough and Teun van Dijk who have also shaded primary light on roles of discourse analysts as social agents for the transformation of society. Similarly, to develop the general concept of the novel, this paper initially discusses the nature of the novel briefly and to bring the different socio-political issues from the novel into forefront, it highlights the issues like inequality, power politics, hegemony, ideology, exploitation, domination, discrimination, injustice etc by exploiting the concept of CDA and its different tools in the facing part of the paper. This examination leads to finding the issues mentioned in the novel are unavoidable agenda of CDA and different tools of CDA describe how discourse pattern is changed. In this way, this paper helps the readers in understanding the concept of CDA and its different tools to treat the discourse pattern in the Roy's novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.