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As I understand Discourse Studies, it's all about communicative acts in specific social and cultural settings. People working in Discourse Studies investigate not only the contexts in which discourse develops and circulates but also the cognitive, cultural, interactional, and political processes that inform this production.
I understand the word discourse in its broadest sense, the way Umberto Eco defines a "sign": anything that can be used to lie. So discourse encompasses more than just speech and writing. In addition to nonverbal, visual, and electronic communication, it can include other forms of social interchange such as myth and ritual. It inherits from semiotics a concern with signs, media, and genres.
Discourse Studies uses the methods of rhetoric, literary criticism, linguistics, and cultural studies to explore the formation, maintenance, dissolution, and reformation of discourses. From ancient times, rhetoric has been developing theories about the relation of authors, audiences, and public forums as revealed in language. Poetics, or literary criticism, has probed the motives, conditions, and artifacts of written art. Linguistics has added sophisticated means of describing and analyzing discourse, discourse users, and discourse communities. Cultural studies broadens the scope further with its theories and analyses of contextual influences. In Discourse Studies, these approaches come together with insights from a range of theories of discourse and society to provide a rich interdisciplinary analysis of communication in action.
In my own scholarly work, I stick pretty close to rhetorical and literary criticism. The texts I analyze—theoretical, artistic, and practical—are mainly modern (1800-the present). I have written on environmental rhetoric, nineteenth-century poetry, the theory of appeals in modern rhetoric, and the discourses of sexuality and the body. Mainly historical and analytical, my methods draw upon phenomenological criticism, pragmatism (and pragmatics), and New Historicism as well as the theories of such cross-over figures as Kenneth Burke and Wayne Booth—my heroes because they more or less ignored the divide between rhetoric and poetics in their work and in their illustrious careers. |
