Dissolution of the House of Representatives, 2020: Politics of Representation in the State-Owned English Broadsheet The Rising Nepal

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.