Discourse Theory And Critical Media Politics

A systematic examination of the relationship between post-Marxist discourse theory and media studies. This volume interrogates discourse theory – as read via the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe – through an engagement with major approaches to critical media politics and a range of issues in contemporary media politics.

Neoliberalism, Media and the Political examines the condition of media and journalism in neoliberal cultures. Emphasizing neoliberalism's status as a political ideology that is simultaneously hostile to politics, the book presents a critical theoretical argument supported by empirical illustrations from New Zealand, Ireland, the UK and the US.

Written by researchers from a wide variety of disciplines, this report explores the two most influential theoretical discourse traditions, namely Discourse Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis. Based on numerous Swedish and Scandinavian case studies, this account reveals the usefulness of the study of discourse and exemplifies how the two discourse analytical perspectives can be combined to offer diverse and problem-oriented strategies in the study of politics, identity, and social change.

"This book's main objective is to expand discourse theory into the realm of the cultural, by focusing on specific discursive machines and mechanisms in the fields of the media and the arts and literature. The themes vary from war to gaming culture, from new realist poetry to Mario Toral's mural painting, and from literary history to Mexican cinema. The greater number of chapters in this volume deals with a variety of media, including television, newspapers, film, ads, press communiques, online forums and videogames. Content-wise these chapters are primarily discourse-theoretical analyses of a wide range of conflicts and their representations. Although the application of discourse theory is virtually non-existent within the realm of Literary and Art Studies, a substantial number of chapters introduce key discourse-theoretical notions as antagonism and agonism, hegemony, and indeterminacy into these fields."--BOOK JACKET.

The topic of Language and Ideology has increasingly gained importance in the linguistic sciences. The general aim of critical linguistics is the exploration of the mechanisms of power which establish inequality, through the systematic analysis of political discourse (written or oral). This reader contains papers on a variety of topics, all related to each other through explicit discussions on the notion of ideology from an interdisciplinary approach with illustrative analyses of texts from the media, newspapers, schoolbooks, pamphlets, talkshows, speeches concerning language policy in Nazi-Germany, in Italofascism, and also policies prevalent nowadays. Among the interesting subjects studied are the jargon of the student movement of 1968, speeches of politicians, racist and sexist discourse, and the language of the green movement. Because of the enormous influence of the media nowadays, the explicit analysis of the mechanisms of “manipulation”, “suggestion”, and “persuasion” inherent in language or about language behaviour and strategies of discourse are of social relevance and of interest to all scholars of social sciences, to readers in all educational institutions, to analysts of political discourse, and to critical readers at large.

This book departs from the premise that political discourse is intrinsically connected with media discourse, as shaped by its cultural and transcultural characteristics. It presents a collection of papers which examine political discourse in the media from a cross-culturally comparative perspective in Arab, Dutch, British, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Israeli, Swedish, US-American and international contexts. By using different theoretical frameworks, such as conversation analysis, discourse analysis, pragmatics and systemic functional linguistics, the papers reflect current moves in political discourse analysis to cross-disciplinary and methodological boundaries by integrating semiotics, particularly multimodality, cognition, context, genre and recipient design.

This volume gathers the work of the Brussels Discourse Theory Group, a group of critical media and communication scholars that deploy discourse theory as theoretical backbone and analytical research perspective. Drawing on a variety of case studies, ranging from the politics of reality TV to the representation of populism, Communication and Discourse Theory highlights both the radical contingent nature and the hegemonic workings of media and communication practices. The book shows the value and applicability of discourse-theoretical analysis (DTA) within the field of media and communication studies.

Drawing inspiration from the works of those such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, the contributors address questions using a common theoretical language, and also assess the future directions of discourse theory in the social sciences.