Or, All the Pretty Discourses
So it’s that time of year again—the one filled with stress and panic and copious amounts of alcohol. Not for me, you understand, for the doctoral candidates knocking up my inbox to have their dissertations edited in time. I want to take this opportunity to say, “Thanks, grad students!” Not just for the PayPal infusions, although I like those too, but because every thesis or dissertation I read teaches me something new. There’s a reason I give you guys a discount, and it’s not entirely due to my commitment to higher education.
Here’s what I learned about this week: critical discourse analysis and its sassy younger sister, feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis (go on, read it—it’s a short paper, and it explains both terms). I waded in Foucault and Derrida in grad school, but that wasn’t the main course of my study, so this was all new to me. The sparkly bit that caught my eye?
FPDA believes in complexity rather than polarization of subjects of study.
What’s that mean? Basically, it means that this method of analyzing discourse (any kind, the weirder the better, apparently) prefers not to divide speakers into powerful vs. powerless, voiced vs. voiceless, oppressor vs. oppressed. The official reason is because power tends to shift, elevating the formerly oppressed into a role of authority. The unofficial but obvious reason? Because complexity is much more interesting, especially for writers, who, presumably, are writing about people and what they have to say. Polarity can be very limiting.
Enough about scholarly analysis of discourse. Earlier this evening I attended a book launch and listened to this woman talk about a character she created for a fictional habitat who ultimately never made it into the book. Most writers do this, but it isn’t discussed often: so much informs a story that the end readers never even know about. There are marginal or interstitial voices surrounding every narrative, fictional or not, and reacting to it, shaping it. We only hear half of the conversation.
Anyway, if you’re celebrating Thanksgiving next week, enjoy it and any related days off. While you’re sitting around the table, imagine what scholars would do with your family conversation. How would they quantify it? What roles would they assign? Whose voice is absent yet still profoundly shaping the discourse?