Discourse analysis meets textual analysis

Well, I have come from the night of the living dead into the land of the living as I am trying to shake off this cold. Today is officially day 6 of the cold from hell, and I’m feeling better finally and am back to the gym. Progress!

I was struck by Rachael’s comment in her blog that our text _What Writing Does and How it Does It_ is rather “textbooky.” I thought so, too, when I first read it. The underlining in the introduction and the emphasis of points was the first indication of this. The use of the typeface is meant to cause the reader’s attention to linger to grasp key concepts and definitions. At the same time that the book is “textbooky,” it’s also useful for the way it expands the reach of discourse analysis into the realm of textual analysis.

My understanding of discourse analysis over the years has not been as wide-ranging and all-inclusive as this volume indicates. I always associated discourse analysis with colleagues in communication studies who were analyzing “talk” or “conversation,” what Bazerman and Prior refer to as a “focus on spoken language” (1). As they point out, discourse analysis has been a “major analytical method in social science research fields such as communication studies, sociology, and anthropology” (1). This book challenges and expands the notion of discourse analysis “to engage with written text” (1). I find this to be a very productive and useful expansion of discourse analysis, and one calculated to be popular with those of us in Rhetoric and Composition who are used to analyzing texts already. At the same time, I wonder how proponents of discourse analysis respond to this expansion? What is gained and what is lost in the movement across spoken into written language or vice versa? What utility does each have in its own realm?

That concern aside, I appreciate the turn toward textual analysis and the melding together of textual and discourse analysis, especially the focus on writing as a “social and productive practice” (2). I especially like the point about focusing on “what texts do and what texts mean” rather than what they mean (3). The six questions on p. 3 are significant ones as they focus on elements and features that indicate how texts are made/produced, shaped, circulated, received.

Bringing discourse analysis to textual analysis (the methods many of us are used to in literary studies and rhetoric) allows us to “examin[e] communicative practice so as to uncover signs of social identities, institutions, and norms as as well as the means by which these social formations are established, negotiated, enacted and changed through communictaive practice” (3). The question I had as I read that claim, though, was "hasn't rhetoric addressed that all along anyway?" We can return to that when we read Jack Selzer's essay in the volume next week.

Unlike most volumes that address a particular method, we are not treated to a history of the method or methods in the volume (which left the history junkie in me scrambling around looking for such a history--see Fairclough); rather Bazerman and Prior have allowed the 11 authors in the book to "model" their approaches to textual analysis (6). Each writer addresses the "basic concepts" and key studies in the area of their research focus. Then they offer an applied analysis and give suggestions for future readings (6).

I will be curious to see what everyone in the class thinks of this approach--does it work as a good introduction to a method? Is the combining/connection of two methods confusing? is this an example of the multimodality and methodological diversity that we read about last week?

One of the challenges posed by editing a book like this is how well a particular method is defined, analyzed, and modeled, and to what end? And for whom? And how well do common themes or threads--in this case methods--pull across the volume? Could you read essays from this volume and apply what you have learned about method, to some degree, or at least understand the method enough to develop a reading program to learn more and see it demonstrated in more research?

The structure of the book is twofold. Part I focused on "analyzing texts." Part II on processes of writing, textual practice. So there is a huge range here of essays, which we're reading and blogging. I'll be curious to read the blogs and see what you have made of these pieces.

Key Citations:

Fairclough. 1995. _Critical Discourse Analysis_
Huckin and Selzer.

Questions:
My question is, overall, how well this volume hangs together as a demonstration of how to undertake textual analysis? A number of students in our program have turned to Huckin's chapter as useful way to do content analysis in the past, so I am aware of the real utility of an essay like that.

I also wonder how much this text challenges our notions of textual analysis. How have we been doing "textual analysis" all along? What were your methods prior to reading this? Literary? Rhetorical? How conscious were you of analyzing and assessing your methods? Were you just doing an analysis and leaving it at that?