Creativity as Ideology: A Dual-Framework CDA Analysis of Pakistani English Literary Fiction

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between linguistic creativity and ideological discourse in Pakistani English literary fiction, applying a dual-framework integration of Carter's (2004) creativity taxonomy and Fairclough's (1992) three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) model to a purposively sampled analytical dataset of 935 extracts from four novels. Three analytically distinct gains are identified and empirically demonstrated. Gain 1: Carter's taxonomy provides the principled selection criterion for Fairclough's Dimension 1 textual analysis, resolving the feature-selection problem inherent in corpus-scale CDA. Gain 2: Fairclough's Dimension 3 social practice analysis reveals the ideological significance of creativity events that formal analysis alone cannot determine. Gain 3 — the study's central contribution: in the most analytically significant extracts, the Carter creativity event and the Fairclough Dimension 1 feature are formally identical — the same textual choice simultaneously constituting the aesthetic achievement and the discursive-ideological intervention. This formal inseparability is demonstrated across gender, class, and cultural identity ideological fields. The study establishes that creativity in postcolonial Pakistani English fiction is not a formal property deployed in the service of ideology but is found to be both simultaneously.