Constructing Identity through Language and Power in Literature

Language has long occupied a central position in humanistic inquiry,
yet its significance in literary studies extends far beyond its function
as a neutral vehicle for communication. Across literary traditions and
critical paradigms, language has been understood as a dynamic
system through which power is exercised, contested, and reproduced.
The relationship between language, power, and identity forms one of
the most generative and contested domains within contemporary
literary and cultural theory. To read a literary text is not merely to
decode its surface meanings; it is to encounter the architectures of
social authority, the silences imposed upon marginalized subjects,
and the possibilities of resistance that language simultaneously
forecloses and enables.