Ideology In Children's World

The present thesis makes an attempt to explore ideology in Children's world by critical discourse analysis. Disney animated film Mulan is used as a case study. In recent years, there are many critical researches on public discourses while those on children's discourses are few. In fact, writing for children is usually purposeful; its intention being to foster in the child reader a positive appreciation of some socio-cultural values which, it is assumed, shared by author and audience (Stephens, 1992:3). Animated cartoons made by different countries which can be considered as the audio-visual fairy tales in the modern world are also ideological. Therefore, Disney's Mulan deserves investigation.The present study gives close critical discourse analysis of Mulan to see how ideology exists in children's world and what types of American ideology exist in it. And the analytical theory is based on the critical linguist Fairclough's three-dimensional model: description, interpretation and explanation. Based on the analytical framework, the author makes detailed analyses of the script Mulan which consist of three satges. The first stage is text analysis. The paper investigates vocabulary, sentences, dialogues and narrative language employed in the script and finds out the characteristics of the language use in Mulan. The second stage is processing analysis. It focuses on how the scriptwriter and the readers (or audience) interact with each other through the script Mulan. The readers (or audience) interpret the script Mulan, depending on the members' resources (MR). It is generated through a combination of what is "in" the text and what is "in" the interpreter. The last stage is social analysis, which explains the social elements that influence the creation of this film and the social effects of Mulan. The detailed analyses, i.e., text analysis, processing analysis and social analysis, result in the revelation of how ideology operates in children's discourses, which uncovers three types of American ideology in Disney's Mulan: awareness of self-identification, feminism and individualism.This study, as had expected, is of theoretically enriching the researches on CDA and practically exploring ideology in children's world. The author of the present thesis hopes that her tentative study may help child educators and writers work more scientifically and effectively as well as enrich researches on Critical Discourse Analysis.