The language of anti-revolutionary propaganda. A critical discourse analysis of Czech written prints in the period of the French revolution
Abstract
The proposed contribution deals with the discourse of the Czech written propaganda prints which were being printed in the 1790s with an aim to persuade the population of a foulness of French revolutionary ideas, and with its relation to the discourse of the entertaining and educational prints that were published before and during the revolutionary period by the same authors - especially Czech revivalists grouped around V. M.
Kramerius. The point is to find out to what extent both discourses interpenetrate each other, in other words whether the "disciplinary" tendency of the literary production of enlightenment is close to persuasive techniques of anti-revolutionary propaganda or not.
Therefore, with the aid of a critical analytical methodology of Norman Fairclough, the genre differences of evaluated texts and the author's style are explored at first and then the basic principles of anti-revolutionary discourse are examined (in the sense of "a way of representing"). Thus, the article tries to point out some identical lines of both types of texts (fictive dialogism, absence of argumentation and their dichotomous constructivism) and, thereby, to refer to direct connection between disciplinary and propaganda strategies.