CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2012
| Author | Lueth, Natasha Lynn |
|---|---|
| Title | The Discourse of the Marshall Plan and the Shaping of U.S. Cultural Knowledge |
| Summary | The Marshall Plan, or officially the European Recovery Program (ERP), played a crucial role in transatlantic relations in the twentieth century. Using a critical discourse analysis supplemented by feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis, in this thesis I will look at the discourse of the Marshall Plan by the leaders of the U.S. government at the time of its inception. I will analyze the hearings pertaining to the Marshall Plan in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate to investigate what binaries the discourse portrays and what cultural knowledge this shaped in the United States. My reading and cultural understanding of the discourse evokes Othering of the Soviet Union and Europe, resulting in two consequences. First, the discourse creates Othering of the USSR and Europe in what seems to be dichotomous relationships. Second, the discourse also genders the U.S. as a hegemonic masculinity and Europe as a subordinate masculinity. Consequently, this allows the discourse to posit the United States at the top of a hierarchical order of actors in the international system. This in turn creates an image of the U.S. as superior to the Others (i.e. USSR and Europe), which shapes U.S. cultural knowledge. |
| Supervisor | Zimmermann, Susan |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2012/lueth_natasha.pdf |
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