A Critical Discourse Analysis of Robert Frost’s Poem “The Dust of Snow”

Abstract

The Critical Discourse Analysis emergence from social science influenced other disciplines including literature two decades earlier. The Critical Discourse Analysis was born out of the womb of critical analysis. Fairclough propounded the Critical Discourse Analysis in which three-dimensional approach of descriptive, discursive and explanation are taken to examine a piece of literature. The present research paper aims at analysing Robert Frost’s poem ‘The Dust of Snow’ under CDA approach. it explores the connection between the use of language and the social and political contexts dismantling the issues such as gender, ethnicity, cultural difference, ideology and identity and how they are both constructed and reflected in texts. The paper seeks to expose the ideology of Frost in the poem. The poem is a myth-breaker, a creator of positive attitude towards pre-assumed negativity about Nature, its objects and creatures, and treasury of literary and technical devices of irony, conflict, surprise, synecdoche, symbols, and metaphors. The qualitative methodology has been employed in which CDA method is adopted for the study.