Norman Fairclough

Why do I ALWAYS lose my reviews? Do all of you always lose your reviews? This one was going great and then I just barely TOUCHED the trackpad and boom, lost forever. Well, I choose despite over despond: not gonna rewrite, just gonna leave a very few words and then go seethe.

By adding the "critical," Fairclough basically does for classic discourse analysis and pragmatics a more sophisticated and linguistically informed version of what Bourdieu did for speech act theory in Language and Symbolic Power: socializes it, politicizes it, takes us away from "interlocutors" doing tricks with words for purposes arbitrary except for their explanatory power and toward something that shows how we are blinded by our own verbal pyrotechnics to the power stories that speak through us. And then at the same time, for classic Foucauldian "discourse," dialogizing it, linguistifying it. Showing how these discourses that are social and not individual are enacted in real human institutions and inculcated in and by we poor sons of toil, manifesting not only as ways of representing (discourses) but ways of doing (genres) and being (styles).

This is a really clear and practically focused textbook giving concepts and real-world examples, though I don't think Fairclough is as far along toward a practical "discourse hermeneutics" as he thinks he is. But maybe I'll change my mind when I read more of his stuff, both because this book warrants it and because I have what I thought were some neat further thoughts to share. But I am both petulant and in need of doing some Christmas shopping and right now I'm not telling you shit else.… (meer)