Revealing a Critical Discourse Analysis of Conservatism with Regard to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

This paper is an attempt to investigate the ideology of conservatism in Leonard Huxley’s Brave New World from critically. Huxley’s novel was selected for having the theme of conservatism. The study applies Van Dijk’s model (2006) to analyze how conservatives structure their speech, focusing on lexical, syntactic, and social categories. Thus, three levels of structures are investigated. The first level (microstructure) deals with lexical, syntactic, and rhetorical categories. The second level (macrostructure) deals with categories, like power, identity, and dominance in affecting conservatism. The third level (superstructure) deals with how conservatives’ speech is schemed. In Huxley’s novel, it is found that most conservatives follow a negative lexicalization when describing others. Furthermore, simple sentences, declaratives, active voice, and the present simple tense are the most used syntactic categories by conservatives. Within social categories, the power of control, individual identity, and the value and value conflict model are the most prominent macro categories in conservatives’ speeches. Lastly, conservatism has a special scheme that can be found in most conservatives’ speech, which consists of introducing the topic, persuading or rejecting it, and closing the topic.