Emotive strategies in English poetic texts within authoritarian discourse

The article aims to uncover emotive strategies in poetic texts written under authoritarian regimes. Within the authoritarian discourse (which is viewed upon in the article as an asymmetric type of discourse), poetic text is used as a manipulative tool to strengthen the authority of the state leader, reinforce propagandistic ideas, or declare injustice in society. The material for the study consists of English translations of poetic texts written by authors who played or continue to play various roles in the public life of a particular country. In particular, the study analyses poetic texts by an author-dictator, a poet of the regime, and dissident poets. It is stated that emotive strategy is the author’s conscious use of emotional triggers, which are marked in poetic texts by networks of expressive means and stylistic devices that are designed to evoke such emotions as admiration, loyalty, fear, or humiliation in recipients in order to achieve ideological goals. In poetic texts, the emotive strategy reflects the transition from one emotional state of the addresser to another. With regard to this, the article distinguishes between primary and secondary images of emotions. The primary image of emotion is an internal feeling that serves as a starting point or stimulus for the formation of the target / purposeful emotion in a poetic text. In the article, the concept of a “purposeful emotion image” is used synonymously with the term “secondary emotion image”. The analysis of emotive strategies reveals specific features of their development depending on the authors’ roles of authors in society: the transition from anger to humiliation in the text of the authordictator; the transition from the implicit real emotion of fear to the constructed, fabricated emotion of ideological respect or awe in the text of the regime-influenced poet; and the emotive shift from despair and indignation to hope and solidarity in the texts of dissident poets.