VAN DIJK'S CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI: A STUDY OF KEATS'S LYRICAL BALLAD

Abstract

This paper uses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA, as suggested by Teun A. van Dijk) to examine the ballad La Belle Dame sans Merci by John Keats and to understand how discourse structures create cognitive narratives and cultural schemata. There is a combination of macrostructure (cyclical enchantment, abandonment, and desolation themes), microstructure (lexico-grammatical units of decay, dream, and wound), and superstructure (dialogue framing, refrains, and sequence of narrativeness). These layers demonstrate that the knight's testimony is an affect-oriented discourse that tempts readers to extrapolate about cultural schemes of gender, desire, and otherness. The interdiscursive analysis has placed the poem in the context of medieval romance, folk ballad, and femme fatale, demonstrating how intertextual clues can provide background knowledge that readers apply in interpreting agency and culpability. Results support and develop close-reading, feminist, and focalization-based explanations by establishing systematic correlations between visible textual transfers and ideological conclusions, while maintaining poetic indeterminacy. The study has some methodological contributions, including modifying van Dijk's CDA to apply it to lyrical poetry, making interdiscursivity and cluster of metaphor as the central principles, as well as incorporating microstructure metrics, and proposing the directions of conducting comparative corpus analysis and reception-history studies to understand the generality of identified patterns of gendered agency.