On critical discourse analysis (Fairclough)

There were so many terms this week - an overwhelming number of terms. Or, perhaps I am just becoming more aware of what to pay attention to - the terms and concepts which make discourse analysis what it is. I'm going to try to reflect, analyze and make connections, but in this post I also want to lay out the terms Jorgensen and Phillips take the time to explicate in their chapter on CDA, and more specifically on CDA through Fairclough (and his co-researchers over time such as Wodak and Chouliaraki).

What is discourse? On p. 62, Jorgensen and Phillips write that "in critical discourse analysis, language-as-discourse is both a form of action (cf. Austin 1962) through which people can change the world and a form of action which is socially and historically situated in a dialectical relationship with the social".

For Fairclough, discourse is made of...

• text
• texts are linguistic and multimodal productions that are discursively created
• discursive practices
• how people produce and consume texts, within larger social practices
• social practices
• non-discursive practices which have a dialectical relationship with discursive practices

In Fairclough's version of CDA, understanding the 'ordering' of discourses is also important to theorize this, he draws from Bourdieu theory of field - no mention of habitus, however. Thus the ways various fields interact are ordered. I was a bit confused about how we can speak to what this order is, but know from Bourdieu that much as Laclau and Mouffe speak to individuals being over-determined by given 'identities' or 'discourses', so to can fields interact and contend with negotiations of discourse.

This brings me to a range of terms that must be particularly of interest to literacy scholars, especially given these concepts make their way so fluidly into literacy scholarship. The sections on intertextuality and interdiscursivity