The theory is applied to the domain of politics, including the debate about the war in Iraq, where political leaders' speeches serve as a case study for detailed contextual analysis."--BOOK JACKET.
The second volume of this introduction to discourse studies focuses on the fundamental interactional, social, political and cultural functions of text and talk, and shows that discourse is not merely form and meaning, but also action.
Language plays a central role in creating and sustaining the market society - a society in which market exchange is no longer simply a process, but an all-encompassing social principle. The book examines the phenomena from a linguistic and critical perspective, drawing on critical discourse analysis and sociological treatises of market society.
What is the purpose of public talk in a democratic society? Do the American people interact with their government in distinctive ways? Are the nation's mass media helpful or harmful to the democratic experience? In Politics, Discourse, and American Society, some of the nation's best young scholars take us beyond conventional perspectives to present original work on how politics is transacted in American society and how public communication affects those transactions. They also lay out directions for future research, thereby putting fresh ideas on the scholarly agenda. The authors ask whether the American president is genuinely powerful, if lawsuits have become a way of changing the nation's politics, whether public opinion polling is really objective, and whether politics can still be distinguished from pop culture.
Mastering Discourse gathers and elaborates more than a decade of thought on the problems of the intellectual in contemporary society, by one of the most distinguished critics writing on these issues today. From Derrida and Foucault to Kristeva and Irigaray, Paul A. Bové looks at the practices of literary and cultural theory, and discusses the way theorists have produced their institutional positions and politics. Examining some of the major theories developed out of and in relation to the problems of discourse, Bové analyzes the limited successes and failures of these efforts. Mastering Discourses offers an account of why "theory" fails to deal adequately with the politics of discursive cultures and warns that unless critics take much more seriously their own disciplinary inscriptions they will always reproduce structures of power and knowledge that they claim to oppose. Moreover, Bové argues, they will not fulfill the main role of the post-enlightenment intellectual, namely: to respond effectively to the present, through new theoretical and historical formulations that address the changing world of transnational capitalism and its neoliberal ideologies.
The ten volumes of Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, cultural, variational, interactional, or discursive angles, this seventh volume underlines the mutually constitutive relation between society and language use. It highlights a number of the most prominent approaches of this relation and it draws attention to a selected number of topics that the study of language in its social context has characteristically brought to bear. Despite their theoretical and methodological differences, each of the chapters in this book assumes that it is necessary to look at society and language use as interdependent phenomena, and that by attending to microscopic linguistic phenomena one is also keeping a finger on the pulse of broader, macroscopic social tendencies that at the same time facilitate and constrain language use. The introduction provides a sketch of the intellectual antecedents of the volume’s two ‘mother disciplines’, viz., linguistics and social theory before pointing at recent common ground in the rising attention for discourse and what has come to be called ‘late-modernity’.
Now available in paperback, this book is a critical introduction to discourse analysis as it is practised in a variety of different disciplines today, from linguistics and sociolinguistics to sociology and cultural studies. The author shows how concern with the analysis of discourse can be combined, in a systematic and fruitful way, with an interest in broader problems of social analysis and social change. Fairclough provides a concise and critical review of the methods and results of discourse analysis, discussing the descriptive work of linguists and conversation analysts as well as the more historically and theoretically oriented work of Michel Foucault. He develops an original framework for discourse analysis which firmly situates discourse in a broader context of social relations bringing together text analysis, the analysis of processes of text production and interpretation, and the social analysis of discourse events.
Introducing Discourse Analysis: From Grammar to Society is a concise and accessible introduction by bestselling author, James Paul Gee, to the fundamental ideas behind different specific approaches to discourse analysis, or the analysis of language in use. The book stresses how grammar sets up choices for speakers and writers to make, choices which express, not unvarnished truth, but perspectives or viewpoints on reality. In turn, these perspectives are the material from which social interactions, social relations, identity, and politics make and remake society and culture. The book also offers an approach to how discourse analysis can contribute to lessening the ideological divides and echo chambers that so bedevil our world today. Organized in a user-friendly way with short numbered sections and recommended readings, Introducing Discourse Analysis is an essential primer for all students of discourse analysis within linguistics, education, communication studies, and related areas.
Drawing on poststructuralist approaches, Craig Martin outlines a theory of discourse, ideology, and domination that can be used by scholars and students to understand these central elements in the study of culture. The book shows how discourses are used to construct social institutions-often classist, sexist, or racist-and that those social institutions always entail a distribution of resources and capital in ways that capacitate some subject positions over others. Such asymmetrical power relations are often obscured by ideologies that offer demonstrably false accounts of why those asymmetries exist or persist. The author provides a method of reading in order to bring matters into relief, and the last chapter provides a case study that applies his theory and method to racist ideologies in the United States, which systematically function to discourage white Americans from sympathizing with poor African Americans, thereby contributing to reinforcing the latter's place at the bottom of a racial hierarchy that has always existed in the US.