Beyond Science and Ideology Critique: Developments in Critical Discourse Analysis

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is an explicitly normative analysis of how texts and discourses work in ideological interests with powerful political consequences. This chapter provides an historical overview of CDA, placing it in the long lineage of attempts to develop a normative political linguistics beginning with Voloshinov. Recent approaches and procedures are discussed. These attempt to bring together text analysis with contemporary social, political, and cultural theory. The case is made that new conditions of economic and cultural globalization have created theoretical and empirical challenges for CDA and, more generally, for a critical applied linguistics. It is argued that these will require that CDA augment its strong focus on ideology critique with the study of texts that model the productive uses of power and discourse in new conditions.