Nuclearism: Media Discourse, ImageSchemata, and the Cold War

Abstract

Nuclear ideology, or nuclearism, was for many years an intrinsic part of American identity. Atomic bombs incited fear, but also awe and admiration. People lived their lives conditioned by these dualities, feeling anxiety about the chances of an all-out nuclear war, but also being proud of the greatest American achievement. This paper presents a multidisciplinary approach to the study of nuclear discourse and its impact on the audience and their behavior. Using theories of CDA along with Cognitive Linguistics and Evolutionary Psychology, the goal of this paper is to analyze news media in order to understand the role it may have played in the framing and categorization of nuclear affairs within the internal mental structure of the American public. I focused this study on top newspapers and a particular linguistic strategy: metaphor-related words that triggered an image schema. The paper looks at production but also at reception to demarcate the possible outcomes of ideological discourse on the public’s behavior. In order to look at reception with a complete understanding of the mechanisms that may have elicited different responses, this work employs theories of evolutionary psychology to prove whether certain discursive strategies could have had the power to activate attitudes towards nuclear affairs.