Dissolution of the House of Representatives, 2020: Politics of Representation in the State-Owned English Broadsheet The Rising Nepal
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Department of English
Abstract
This research divulges the politics of the state-owned English broadsheet, The
Rising Nepal, in the representation of the dissolution of the House of Representatives,
2020, within the discursive parameter, and its constructive role in the ideological
construction. The broadsheet has manipulated the capital—literal and symbolic, and,
played a constructive role in ideological construction by working in positive or
productive ways to generate, sustain and perpetuate discursive regime of
representation and providing it with a representational legitimacy to serve the
government’s ideology. The study analyzes the language and visual in The Rising
Nepal: news stories, headlines, word choice, visual depiction and page layout on the
front pages, and the editorial arguments concerning the discourse; taking the
equivalent elements from the privately run newspaper The Kathmandu Post as a foil.
Employing cultural theory of representation (constructionist approach), the study, for
the textual analysis, mainly falls back upon James Paul Gee’s concept on “seven
building tasks of language” and the “Discourses” tool of inquiry. Likewise, for the
analysis of visual grammar, it has resorted to Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s
Visual Social Semiotics, especially the tools related to the three layers of visual
meanings : representational, interactive and compositional. The study, finally, aims to
create critical language awareness, to make the readers/viewers able to read between
the lines and to see the “unseen,” to surface the underlying and to divulge the hidden
while dealing with media discourse.