Suchergebnisse

Through critical discourse analysis (CDA) and the discourse-historical approach (DHA), this book probes into political discourse imbued with historical legacies, with particular focus on explicating the structure and function of AKP stories and its relationship with Turkish politics.

Through critical discourse analysis (CDA) and the discourse-historical approach (DHA), this book probes into political discourse imbued with historical legacies, with particular focus on explicating the structure and function of AKP stories and its relationship with Turkish politics. It offers an alternative way of reading the transformation in such politics via the pattern of deconstruction, reconstruction, and policymaking. It systematically delineates how President R. Tayyip Erdoğan's political discourse evokes dialog that embodies the grand legacy of history, deconstructs the mentality of the opposition, reconstructs an alternative dialog, and converts discourse into policy. The book breaks a new ground by introducing a theoretical framework on the relationship between political discourse and policy. It traces how political stories sourced largely by appropriated historical themes and figures enable rhetoricians to weave simple yet good and influential stories to legitimize potential political action, by beguiling people's hearts and minds.

AbstractContemporary Turkey has gone through many reforms that have been legitimized by country's historical legacy. The constitutive elements of this legacy are images, historical figures, events, and symbolisms embedded in memory. It is through those elements that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the leader of the Justice and Development Party sets himself up as the appropriate narrator and appropriate doer, incrementally gaining an upper hand in the legitimacy struggles by telling stories from history, emerging as the new founding father of Turkey and introducing new policies rooted in the legacy of the past. How has he been able to occupy such a position of superiority through the struggles for legitimacy in Turkish politics? This paper critically argues that Erdoğan first set up his personality, imposing himself as the most appropriate narrator and finally showing himself to be the most appropriate doer, by crafting his political communication with symbols and figures from history.