This seminar is drafted as an introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis or Critical Discourse Studies in the field of linguistics. According to van Dijk (1998a), Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a field that is concerned with studying and analyzing written and spoken texts to reveal the discursive sources of power, dominance, inequality, and bias. It examines how these discursive sources are maintained and reproduced within specific social, political and historical contexts. By ‘critical’ discourse analysis, [Fairclough] mean[s] discourse analysis which aims to systematically explore often opaque relationships of causality and determination between (a) discursive practices, events, and texts, and (b) wider social and cultural structures, relations and processes; to investigate how such practices, events and texts arise out of and are ideologically shaped by relations of power and struggles over power; and to explore how the opacity of these relationships between discourse and society is itself a factor securing power and hegemony (1993: 135). In this seminar, we will consider language as a social practice and investigate language use as both socially shaped and also socially shaping. Particular focus is laid on the analysis of discursive practices through which understandings, disagreements and conflicts about borders are negotiated and by and through which borders are produced.
Bibliography
Barker, Chris: Cultural Studies and Discourse Analysis: A Dialogue on Language and Identity. London: Sage
Fairclough, N. (1989): Language and Power. Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman
Koller, Veronika, Susanne Kopf, and Marlene Miglbauer, eds. (2019): Discourses of Brexit. Abingdon: Routledge.
Leeuwen, Theo van (2008): Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Wodak, Ruth (2009): Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. Los Angeles: SAGE.
Wodak, Ruth, and Bernhard Forchtner, eds. (2017): The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics. Abingdon: Routledge.
- DozentIn: Eva Nossem