Official Discourse Routledge Revivals

First published in 1979, Official Discourse is an unofficial report of theoretical investigations into a specific state of practice- the publication of reports of official inquiries into law, order and justice issues. The commissions, tribunals and committees of inquiry scrutinized in this book examine problems arising from wrongful imprisonment, police corruption, industrial picketing, and communal rioting and internment in Northern Ireland. Focusing on the reasons why government reports take the form they do, the authors venture into the areas of linguistics, psychoanalysis and Marxism. The book is an exercise in discourse analysis, an exercise in theoretical work that looks at the relationships between theory and literary production, and a critique of official conceptions of law, order and justice.

The essays in this collection, first published in 1987, represent a collective attempt to listen with the third ear to the underhand ways the unspoken has of speaking, and to speak of these ways. By focusing on ‘discourse’ the volume is distinguished from traditional literature by its emphasis on rhetorical structures and textual strategies, and the investment of these structures with desire, power and other aspects of subjectivity, rather than the personality of the artist or the creative process. However, in this book the human dimension is not lost. By claiming that the structures in question are not merely linguistic, semiotic, or narratological (although they are all of these), the human dimension is returned- not ‘in the raw’, as in traditional approaches, but through the traces it leaves in the text, as activated by its reading. This book is ideal for students of literature and psychoanalytical theory.

Religious crosses the spheres of both the private life and the public institution. In a liberal democracy, public and private interests and goals prove to be inseparable. Clarke Cochran’s interdisciplinary study brings political theory and the sociology of religion together in a fresh interpretation of liberal culture. First published in 1990, this analysis begins with a reassessment of the nature of the "public" and the "private" in relation to the political. The controversy over religion and politics is examined in light of such contested issues of political life as sexuality, abortion, and the changing nature of the family. Clarifying a number of debates central to contemporary society, this timely reissue will be of particular value to students with an interest in the relationship between religious, society, and politics.

First published in 1992, David Kirk’s book analyses the public debate leading up to the 1987 General Election over the place and purpose of physical education in British schools. By locating this debate in a historical context, specifically in the period following the end of the Second World War, it attempts to illustrate how the meaning of school physical education and its aims, content and pedagogy were contested by a number of vying groups. It stresses the influence of the culture of postwar social reconstruction in shaping these groups’ ideas about physical education. Through this analysis, the book attempts to explain how physical education has been socially constructed during the postwar years and, more specifically, to suggest how the subject came to be used as a symbol of subversive, left wing values in the campaign leading to the 1987 election. In more general terms, the book provides a case study of the social construction of school knowledge. The book takes an original approach to the question of curriculum change in physical education, building on increasing interest in historical research in the field of curriculum studies. It adopts a social constructionist perspective, arguing that change occurs through the active involvement of competing groups in struggles over limited material and ideological (discursive) resources. It also draws on contemporary developments in social and cultural theory, particularly the concepts of discourse and ideological hegemony, to explain how the meaning of physical education has been constructed, and how particular definitions of the subject have become orthodoxes. The book presents new historical evidence from a period which had previously been neglected by researchers, despite the fact that 1945 marked a watershed in the development of the understanding and teaching of physical education in schools.

Up until the mid-1980s most pragmatic analysis had been done on spoken language use, considerably less on written use, and very little at all on literary activity. This has now radically changed. ‘Pragmatics’ could be informally defined as the study of relationships between language and its users. This volume, first published in 1991, seeks to reposition literary activity at the centre of that study. The internationally renowned contributors draw together two main streams. On the one hand, there are concerns which are close to the syntax and semantics of mainstream linguistics, and on the other, there are concerns ranging towards anthropological linguistics, socio- and psycholinguistics. Literary Pragmatics represents an antidote to the fragmenting specialization so characteristic of the humanities in the twentieth century. This book will be of lasting value to students of linguistics, literature and society. Roger D. Sell discusses the reissue of Literary Pragmatics here: http://www.routledge.com/articles/roger_d._sell_discusses_the_reissue_of_literary_pragmatics/

This student textbook, originally published in 1991, tackles the traditional problems of the sociology of knowledge from a new perspective. Drawing on recent developments in social theory, Tim Dant explores crucial questions such as the roles of power and knowledge, the status of rational knowledge, and the empirical analysis of knowledge. He argues that, from a sociological perspective, knowledge, ideology and discourse are different aspects of the same phenomenon, and reasserts the central thesis of the sociology - that knowledge is socially determined.

With the growth of popular literary forms, particularly the periodical, during the eighteenth century, women began to assume an unprecedented place in print culture as readers and writers. Yet at the same time the very textual practices of that culture inscribed women within an increasingly restrictive and oppressive set of representations. First published in 1989, this title examines the emergence and dramatic growth of periodical literature, showing how the journals solicited women as subscribers and contributors, whilst also attempting to regulate their conduct through the promotion of exemplary feminine types. By enclosing its female readership within a discourse that defined women in terms of love, matrimony, the family, and the home, the English periodical became one of the main linguistic sites for the construction of the eighteenth-century ideology of domestic womanhood. Based on the close scrutiny of the popular periodical press between 1690 and 1760, including journals such as the Athenian Mercury, the Tatler, and the Spectator, this study will be of particular value to any student of the relationship between women and print culture, the development of women’s magazines, and the study of literary audiences.