Arab World English Journal (AWEJ) Vol.6. No.2 June 2015 Pp. 17 – 34
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.24093/awej/vol6no2.2
How to Qualify for a Non-leader, or the Man who should not have been President
Zouheir A. Maalej
Department of English Language and Translation
College of Languages and Translation
King Saud University
Abstract:
Leadership is closely connected to the political behavior of leaders and their influence on followers. The aim of the current article is to argue that the former Tunisian interim president (henceforth, TIP) acted during his presidency as an anti-leader. The domestic and diplomatic gaffes he made from his inauguration in 2011 up to his stepping down in December 2014, cost the country numerous internal and external crises, and qualified him for losing his career as a politician. To show this, the current article combines (i) Lord & Maher’s information processing theory of leadership, (ii) Avolio & Gardner’s components of leadership, (iii) Critical Discourse Analysis, and (iv) Critical Metaphor Analysis. The corpus of the study consists of texts delivered by the TIP in public, on his own webpage, and to newspapers, which have been collected and commented upon in a book-length documentary by Bahloul (2013), and translated from French to English by the author of the current article.
Key words: CDA, Critical Metaphor Analysis, diplomatic gaffes, domestic gaffes, leadership
Cite as: Maalej, Z. A. (2015). How to Qualify for a Non-leader, or the Man who should not have been President. Arab World English Journal, 8 (1).
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.24093/awej/vol6no2.2