Past Event

Deconstructive and Constructive Moments in the Critical Analysis of News Representations

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has demonstrated rather successfully the many ways in which language use is linked to wider social, cultural and political problems and processes (e.g. van Dijk 1993, 1998; Wodak et al. 1999; Wodak and Chilton 2005). Accordingly, its task is both deconstructive and constructive. Scholars in the field agree that discourse is a complex system of texts and utterances of all kinds, a practical and social activity, reflecting and reproducing culture, knowledge, power and control. CDA’s approach to discourse also implies that in modern societies power relations are often reproduced and legitimized at the ideological level. Hence, ideologies are replicated in discourse and may often become ‘internalized’. Since CDA is specifically interested in revealing the role of discourse in reproducing or challenging socio-political dominance, media are a particular subject of CDA analysis. Media representations such as news are crucial in representing cultures, people, politics and social life.

I have used the tools of CDA to analyze Aboriginal news representations in Canada as well as the representation of the European Union in Canadian print media. A central aim of the latter work was to examine and compare the discursive practices, which are employed by various Canadian newspapers to promote and produce Euro-scepticism or Euro-friendliness on the basis of the various roles and identities they ascribe to the EU.

My study on the discursive representation of First Nations identities in Canada, on the other hand, used Positive Critical Discourse Analysis and paid attention to constructive moments in discourse. It investigated how Native counter-discourses or discourses of resistance contest mainstream Euro-Canadian media images of First Nations and positively represent the ‘Self’.

Selected examples from both studies will serve to show specific linguistic devices and strategies that are used to produce aforementioned discourses and to show how, people, as social subjects, interactively partake in discourses and thus contribute to their maintenance, transformation and/or replacement. Future research ideas with a focus on Aboriginal issues in the (university) classroom will also be presented.

About the Presenter

Steffi Retzlaff has a PhD in Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies from Potsdam University (Germany), and also holds a Master’s degree in Education, German and English (University of Oldenburg, Germany), and a TESOL Certificate (University of Birmingham, UK). Her multi-disciplinary teaching and research interests include topics in Critical Discourse Analysis, Second/Foreign Language Pedagogy, and creative foreign language and culture courses such as drama-pedagogy. She has taught courses in Linguistics, German and ESL/EFL both in Canada and Germany.