The discursive construction of high achievers’ identities in American culture

Abstract

It is a study of the discursive construction of high achievers’ identities in American culture. A corpus of 100 commencement speeches delivered during 2016 and 2017 graduation ceremonies in American universities has been used to analyse how commencement speakers, as a rule highly successful individuals, construct their identities through discourse. Besides celebrating academic achievements, one of the communicative purposes of the commencement speech is giving the graduates advice for the future. It has been investigated how the speakers legitimize their qualifications as a role model and the source of life wisdom. Due to the specificity of the discourse to be investigated, based on the foundations of American ethos of hard work and drive for success, Critical Discourse Analysis (van Dijk 2002, 2009; Wodak 2002; Wodak et al. 2009) has been chosen as a methodological approach which can most adequately help analyze the discursive formation of identity. As the discourse to be analyzed is agentive discourse, culture-specific both in its form and content, I have decided to combine Critical Discourse Analysis with cultural studies (Hall 1990, 1996a, 1996b; Barker and Galasiński 2001).

Work ethos in American ceremonial discourse addressed to the young

“…To bring out the contrast, the speaker uses antithesis in the form of two parallel structures. Failure gets a positive attribution; it is depicted in terms of the metaphor FAILURE IS A BADGE OF HONOR (Bogdanowska-Jakubowska, 2018).…”