The Thread Of Discourse

Material Discourse – Materialist Analysis explores the entanglement of material realities and discourse and shows how a materialist discourse analysis can be put into practice. A cognate concern for language and discourse, as well as well as materiality and materialism can look back on a long tradition in the Social Sciences and Humanities. This book makes their relation an explicit focus. Located at the intersections of materialism and Discourse Studies, it highlights the materiality of discourse and the entanglement of matter and meaning. The essays collected in this volume are united by a rejection of static dichotomies such as discursive / material, language / materiality or material / immaterial. Rather than presenting materialism and Discourse Studies as distinct from one another, they are shown to be intimately entwined. The book brings together theoretical and empirical contributions from a whole range of disciplines, fields, and academic contexts in a truly transdisciplinary and global manner. Material Discourse – Materialist Analysis is a timely intervention into the ongoing debates revolving around materiality, materialism, discourse, and language, as well as the intricate relations between them.

Discourse Studies is an interdisciplinary field studying the social production of meaning across the entire spectrum of the social sciences and humanities. The Discourse Studies Reader brings together 40 key readings from discourse researchers in Europe and North America, some of which are now translated into English for the first time. Divided into seven sections – ‘Theoretical Inspirations: Structuralism versus Pragmatics’, ‘From Structuralism to Poststructuralism’, ‘Enunciative Pragmatics’, ‘Interactionism’, ‘Sociopragmatics’, ‘Historical Knowledge’ and ‘Critical Approaches’ – The Discourse Studies Reader offers a comprehensive overview of the main currents in discourse studies, both discourse theory and discourse analysis. With short introductions elaborating the broader context, the sections present key selections from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds by placing them into their respective epistemological traditions. The Discourse Studies Reader is an indispensable textbook for students and scholars alike who are interested in discourse theoretical questions and working with discourse analytical methods.

Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourseconfronts the impasses in materialist feminist work on rethinking ‘woman’ as a discursively constructed subject. The book looks at the problem of examining critically the social dimensions on which theories of discourse are premised: how such theories understand ‘materiality’; the relation between ‘women’s experience’ and feminist politics, and that between history and discourse. Rosemary Hennessy considers the work of Kristeva, Foucault, Laclau and Mouffe, and argues for a materialist feminist re-articulation of discourse as ideology. Concerns over identity and difference are incorporated into a rewriting of materialist feminism's analysis of women's oppression across capitalist and patriarchal structures. In adapting postmodernist theories in this way, Hennessy develops a project of social change, where feminism, while maintaining its specificity, is necessarily aligned with other emancipatory movements.

Discourse on the Move is the first book-length exploration of how corpus-based methods can be used for discourse analysis, applied to the description of discourse organization. The primary goal is to bring these two analytical perspectives together: undertaking a detailed discourse analysis of each individual text, but doing so in terms that can be generalized across all texts of a corpus. The book explores two major approaches to this task: 'top-down' and 'bottom-up'. In the 'top-down' approach, the functional components of a genre are determined first, and then all texts in a corpus are analyzed in terms of those components. In contrast, textual components emerge from the corpus analysis in the bottom-up approach, and the discourse organization of individual texts is then analyzed in terms of linguistically-defined textual categories. Both approaches are illustrated through case studies of discourse structure in particular genres: fund-raising letters, biology/biochemistry research articles, and university classroom teaching.