Paper Title
A LINGUISTIC STUDY OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY IN THE MIDDLE EAST SINCE 1945: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH
Abstract
“A good discourseisthatfromwhichnothingcanberetrenchedwithoutcuttinginto the quick »
Saint Francis De Sales
The American introduction in the Middle East following World War II has pooredtoomuchink among discourse studies belonging to two schools of American studies’ interpretation(Lomotey, 2010, p. 25). The first one is American Exceptionalism whose proponents propagate a pro-American discourse: “the special character of the United States” (Tyrrell, 2010, p. 1) and its unique mission of “universal redemption” (Gamble, 2012, p. 1). This trend was challenged by American Revisionism; a school of thought that came, in a post-modernist climate fostering inter-disciplinarity, to re-visit, the American historical record targeting “the readjustment of historical writing to historical facts" (1953, p. 7). In this framework, this paper discusses the discourse advocated by the first school (Hahn, 1991; 2005; Taylor, 2009...) with the second school’s postmodern theory of interpretation (Halabi, 2009; Riggenbach, 2012; D’Aquisto, Fowler, 2018….). This paper situates an interdisciplinaryframewrk of cultural studies and linguistics as a methodological guideline selected to conductthisstudy. A synergy of the American Revisionismtheory and SystemicFunctionalLinguistics (Halliday, 2014) has been applied to approachqualitatively the literatureadvocating the American involvement in the regionthen. The application of the framework has led to the findingsthatthisinvolvementhaving been claimed for securingstability, was a covertermhidingideologicaltendencies for securingitseconomicinterests and world hegemony.
Keywords - Discoursestudy, Interdisciplinary, Interpretation, Ideological, Re-Visit