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发表于 2003-6-17 04:18:49
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Context is/as Critique
Context is/as Critique
Jan Blommaert
Ghent University, Belgium
Abstract
In this article the treatment of context in two schools of contemporary discourse analysis – Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Conversation Analysis (CA) – is discussed. Starting from the observation that critical trends in discourse analysis identify the intersection of language and social structure as the locus of critique, I first qualify the treatment of context in some CDA work as largely backgrounding and narrative. Contextual information that invites critical scrutiny is often accepted as ‘mere facts’, framing the discourse samples analyzed in CDA. On the other hand, context is reduced to a minimal set of observable and demonstrably consequential features of single conversations in CA, and ‘translocal’ phenomena are hard to incorporate in CA analyses. Both treatments of context have severe defects, and in the second part of the article I offer three sets of ‘forgotten contexts’: contexts that are usually overlooked in critical discourse studies but that offer considerable critical potential because they situate discourse deeply in social structure and social processes. Using data from an ongoing project on narrative analysis of African asylum seekers’ stories in Belgium, I discuss linguistic-communicative resources, ‘text trajectories’ (i.e. the shifting of text across contexts) and finally ‘data histories’ (i.e. the socio-historical situatedness of ‘data’).
Keywords _ asylum seekers _ contextualization _ discourse analysis _ interpretation _ methodology _ narrative
Critical punch is a desirable thing for discourse analysts such as myself and the other authors in this volume, who feel that new ways of analyzing the importance of symbolic economies in our world(s) are required in order to come to terms with what we experience as shifting and ever more complex patterns of power and inequality.1 One of the major sources and objects of power and inequality is symbolic and revolves around the use and abuse of language and discourse. Work on these linguistic-discursive forms of power and inequality has a respectable pedigree (in fact, one could say that it prompted the emergence of at least some branches of modern sociolinguistics – take Labov’s ‘Logic of Nonstandard English’ [1970] as a case in point). Taking stock of recent scholarly developments as well as of perceived and experienced changes in the world should prompt us perpetually to renew the exercise. An ever-present concern in this exercise is the difference we ourselves can (should?) make: that of specifying detail in discourse, of demonstrating the precise and minute ways in which this symbolic commodity works and generates or articulates power and inequality.
Article
Vol 21(1) 13–32 [0308-275X(200103)21:1; 13–32;016270] Copyright 2001 © SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
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