Discourse and Practice New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis

Adding a new introduction and two previously unpublished papers, Discourseand Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis brings together VanLeeuwen's methodological work on discourse analysis of the last 15 years.Discourse, Van Leeuwen argues, is a resource for representation, a knowledgeabout some aspect of reality which can be drawn upon when that aspect of realityhas to be represented, a framework for making sense of things. And they areplural. There can be different discourses, different ways of making sense of thesame aspect of reality that serve different interests and will therefore be usedin different social contexts. However abstract some discourses are, discourses ultimately always representdoings, Van Leeuwen argues. Doing is the foundation of knowing, and socialpractices are the foundation of discourses. Studying children's books,newspaper reports, brochures and other texts, as well as photographs andchildren's toys, Van Leeuwen investigates what can happen when practices aretransformed into discourses and provides analytical tools for reconstructingdiscourses from texts. Throughout the book, Van Leeuwen makes connections between sociological andlinguistic or semiotic concepts and methods to ensure the social and criticalrelevance of his analytical categories. Van Leeuwen's work has already beenwidely used by critical discourse analysts across the world. This volume will bea welcome guide for anyone looking for a form of discourse analysis that is bothexplicit and methodical, and critically incisive.

Theo van Leeuwen has worked as a film and television producer and scriptwriter in Holland and Australia. He then studied linguistics and combined the methods of linguistic analysis with his knowledge of visual communication in developing his approach to social semiotics.