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Over the past two decades, critical discourse analysis has emerged as a major new multidisciplinary approach to the study of texts and contexts in the public sphere. Developed in Europe, CDA has lately become increasingly popular in North America, where it is proving especially congenial to new directions in rhetoric and composition. This essay surveys much of this recent literature, noting how rhet/comp has incorporated CDA methodology in a variety of studies of inequality, ethics, higher education, critical pedagogy, news media, and institutional practices. CDA uses rigorous, empirical methods that are sensitive to both context and theory, making it ideal for the demands of a range of projects being developed in our field.
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is an interdisciplinary approach to textual study that aims to explicate abuses of power promoted by those texts, by analyzing linguistic/semiotic details in light of the larger social and political contexts in which those texts circulate. In the words of Ruth Wodak, one of the field's founders and foremost practitioners, "CDA [is] fundamentally interested in analyzing opaque as well as transparent structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power and control when these are manifested in language. In other words, CDA aims to investigate critically social inequality as it is expressed, constituted, and legitimized by language use" (53).
The roots of CDA are varied, ranging from Frankfurt School critical theory to Hallidayan systemic-functional linguistics. Among the many diverse theorists exercising a continuing influence on the field are Foucault, Bourdieu, Gramsci, Habermas, and Giddens. The immediate forerunner of CDA was critical linguistics (CL), a largely linguistic approach to text analysis developed in the United Kingdom by Gunther Kress, Roger Fowler, Bob Hodge, and other students of M. A. K. Halliday in the 1970s. CDA evolved beyond CL by incorporating more social, cognitive, and rhetorical theory, thus broadening the scope of analysis. Key milestones of this period include the publication of Norman Fairclough's Language and Power in 1989; the founding of the field's flagship journal, Discourse and Society in 1990; and a small organizational symposium of the field's founders (Fairclough, Wodak, Kress, Teun van Dijk, and Theo van Leeuwen) in Amsterdam in January 1991.
Critical discourse analysis is based on a number of distinctive principles, including these cited by Fairclough and...