Extending Dramaturgy to Critical Discourse Studies (CDS): : The Myth of Donald Trump’s Presidential Campaign

Political discourse has long been attracting a spate of interest in the realm of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS). The most important reason accounting for this is the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary nature of CDS (Fairclough, 2010; Hart & Cap, 2014; Flowerdew & Richardson, 2018) which makes it a suitable approach to analyse political discourse. Throughout decades, CDS scholars have drawn aspects of sociology, history, cognitive science, political science and linguistics when analysing political discourse; while little has taken the perspective of dramaturgy, which can shape the relationship between text and context, and is key to conceptualise the past and present as well as to imagine the future of the global city.Introduced by Goffman (1959) in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, the dramaturgical model offers a different perspective to sociology by viewing life as a theatre, believing that the world is like a stage and all human interaction is like a play. Like social relations, politics can be comparable to theatre performance, for characteristics of drama are found there (Merelman, 1969; Leichtova, 2016). For a performance to be successful, impression of the audience must be managed (Goffman, 1959). Similarly, politicians must also succeed in impression management to gain the acceptance essential to political power.The present study investigates the ideology of anti-globalisation by analysing the language of a presidential candidate under the context of global cities. It extends the dramaturgical model to Fairclough (1989)’s three-dimensional model of CDS in analysing the discourse of Donald Trump during the start of his Presidential Campaign. Eight speeches which Trump delivered the day he announced his candidacy to he accepted nomination from the Republican Party will be studied. The aim of this research is to take a dramaturgical perspective to analyse how the image and vision of the global city in America are (re)contextualised through language. I will also bring out how dramaturgy offers a new perspective on the socio-cognitive strand of CDS, especially in explaining the inter-relationship between text and context, and how the city’s character and image are produced. Preliminary results show that Trump (re)constructs identities of people living in global cities, projects anti-globalisation ideologies and creates a myth of ‘Make America Great Again’ by using dramaturgical mechanisms such as personification, identification and symbolism.