Semiotics and Critical Discourse Analysis of “The Hero; love story of a spy”

Abstract

Critical Discourse Analysis is a wide discipline from the last few decades to study different aspects of the different discourses present in the society through movies, news papers, media etc. In the end of 1970, discourse as discipline was first used and studied mostly in Australia and UK (Mey 1985, Fowler et al.1979;). CDA counterparts in various disciplines like psychology, sociolinguistics and social sciences etc to develop them critically in 1970s (Birnbaum 1971; Hymes 1972; Fay 1987; Thomas 1993; Calhoun 1995; Turkel 1996; Singh 1996; Wodak 1996; Fox and Prilleltensky 1997; Ibanez and Iniguez 1997). Semiotics is another major disciplines to study the critical effect of the different discourses present in the society through signs. Semiotics investigates signs and symbols and how they are used in a specific context to convey meanings to the listeners and viewers. The present study is mainly focused on the dialogues and images of the movie The Hero; Love story of the spy. How Bollywood portrays the images of ISI (Pakistan Secret Intelligence) in the presence of their army. It is attempted to investigate whether there is any negative or positive effect of presentation of ISI in the movie on their viewers or is this movie a direct attack to malign the status of ISI in the world.