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11 - Poststructuralist Discourse Studies: From Structure to Practice

from Part II - Perspectives and Modes of Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2020

By
Johannes Angermuller
Edited by
Anna De Fina  and
Alexandra Georgakopoulou
Anna De Fina
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington DC
Alexandra Georgakopoulou
Affiliation:
King's College London
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Summary

Poststructuralism has brought social, cultural and political theories into a productive exchange with methods and tools for analyzing text and talk. My contribution outlines the contours of poststructuralist discourse studies (PDS), which is an interdisciplinary field of discourse research inspired by poststructuralism. It gives an overview of poststructuralism, tracing its evolution and identifying its key questions. I then spell out the consequences of poststructuralism for discourse studies, where it has given birth to the new field of PDS. PDS critically relates to the structuralist, top-down tendencies that have characterized some of the pioneering “French School” and “Critical” strands in discourse studies. It defends posthumanist and antiessentialist views on power and knowledge. Perceiving language as a socially constitutive practice, it places emphasis on the critical and reflexive dimensions of discourse research. Situated at the interdisciplinary intersection of language and society, PDS aims to bridge structure- and practice-oriented strands of discourse research and to overcome the divisions between linguistics and other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities.

Keywords

Discoursesocial practicepoststructuralismreality as social constructionFrench Schoolcritical approachesrepresentationagencyreflexivity
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Discourse Studies , pp. 235 - 254
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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References

Further Reading

Angermuller, J., Nonhoff, M., Herschinger, E., Macgilchrist, F., Reisigl, M., Wedl, J., … Ziem, A. (eds.) (2014). Diskursforschung. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Zwei Bände. Band 1: Theorien, Methodologien und Kontroversen. Band 2: Methoden und Analysepraxis Perspektiven auf Hochschulreformdiskurse. Bielefeld: transcript.Google Scholar
Angermuller, J., Maingueneau, D. and Wodak, R. (eds.) (2014). The Discourse Studies Reader: Main Currents in Theory and Analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Baxter, J. (2016). Positioning Language and Identity: Poststructuralist Perspectives. In Preece, S. (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity. Oxford/New York: Routledge. 34–49.Google Scholar
Mills, S. (1997). Discourse. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Torfing, J. (1999). New Theories of Discourse: Laclau, Mouffe and Žižek. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar

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