Lecture/Seminar 12: Review

Readings: It would be useful to go through your notes, and consult the lectures notes on the Web, so that you can identify issues you would like to bring up in our final session.

The course has covered a great deal of ground. I imagine that you will vary among yourselves as to which sort of discourse analysis most appeals to you.

Some people like the fine grain of Conversation Analysis, and its sceptical commitment to analysing 'only what is there'.

Others will prefer to include reference to features outside the talk and text, and be happier with a less data-bound, bottom-up form of DA. And some will want a more politically committed stance, perhaps, and be drawn to Critical Discourse Analysis.

And some will see benefits in both CA and CDA, and would prefer to do the kind of analysis that takes into account political realities but also sticks closely to the materials in the data.

In this last session we shall go over some of the points of tension and conflict in discourse analysis. I can't promise that we shall arrive at one single conclusion. In the end, as is the case with any scholarly enterprise, each analyst makes her or his own judgement.

This week's seminar

Discussion of the range of discourse analyses.

That's the end of the course. I hope you have enjoyed it, or at least some parts of it.

Charles Antaki