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"Languaging" in and across Human Groups: Perspectives on Difference and Asymmetry. Giuseppina Cortese and Dell Hymes, eds. Textus: English Studies in Italy 14. Geneva: Tilgher, 2001. 596 pp.
"Languaging" in and across Hujnan Groups: Perspectives on Difference and Asymmetry addresses the issue of how social identity is situated in everyday communication. "Socialization is an abstraction designating the multiplicity of concrete interactions that lead us into making sense of our own place in the world: on which side of the tracks we were born, and what that means socially" (p. 193). Each chapter is an offshoot of this central idea.
The introduction, written by Giuseppina Cortese, is divided into four different sections to provide the reader with a general understanding of the text. sections 1 and 2 deal with the project at large; section 3 briefly presents the individual chapters; and section 4 imparts some final thoughts. Cortese writes about the importance of placing oneself within the customary social practices.
Norman Fairclough's "The Dialects of Discourse" deals with "social life as interconnected networks of social practices" (p. 231). Fairclough's chapter arises from the meta-argument that societal examination is in search of the cooperation of discourse analysis, with the intention of laying open the linguistic project that borders the political project of new capitalism. Critical discourse analysis, in this chapter, is closely intermingled with and tied to other texts of social practice, including language, body language, and visual imagery.
Jane H. Hill...