Date of Award

6-2018

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in English Composition

Department

English

First Reader/Committee Chair

Feiz, Parastou

Abstract

This project makes the empirical assertion that U.S. President Donald Trump and conservative news media outlets contribute to a national narrative of xenophobia that frames immigrants, particularly those of color, as parasitic and dangerous to the American way of life. Through this study, I assert that the use of demagogic and dehumanizing language along with more subtle discursive strategies, such as positive representation of ‘us’, negative representation of ‘them,’ and metaphorical constructions are being used to stoke fear and anti-immigrant sentiment and to strip individuals of their humanity for the purpose of rendering them unworthy of dignity and of the same rights and benefits as those to which groups considered insiders and ‘real Americans’ are entitled.

Through the lens of Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics, I analyze a collection of transcriptions selected from among 100+ speeches, addresses and remarks delivered by Donald Trump both before and after the 2016 U.S. Presidential Elections, along with a set of ten news stories featuring issues surrounding immigration collected from FoxNews.com, Breitbart.com, and Bill O’Reilly.com. Concordancing software is used to reveal and quantify discursive patterns that contribute to this national narrative of xenophobia.

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