Academic Terror: Ideology in Analysis

The purpose of academic writing is to analyse. Although this is true of the form, there is still room within analysis to move into ideological veins, putting forward views alongside analysis or sometimes in place of it. Linguistics provide us with some of the tools to see these occurrences take place, yet literary theory opens up new doors and enables us to be critical of texts without being critical of authors. In this paper, linguistic and literary techniques are presented before being applied to three separate texts on ‘terrorism’, showing how it is defined and the processes by which the techniques avoid abjection, with extra texts being utilised where appropriate. It concludes that, although ideology does not make texts useless, there is a potential for influential issues to arise