Social Discourse Analysis: Outlines of a Research Project

In this foundational text for the large scale project that produced several major works, including 1889: Un �tat de discours social, Marc Angenot describes the project of amassing and assessing every French text written, and every utterance uttered in 1889, as a way of establishing a range of topics, opinions, argumentative strategies, current usages, in short, the "social discourse" of a single year. As ambitious as it is monumental, this article offers a program for understanding an era in our history, while providing a series of guidelines for studying any utterance and any text, which demands nothing less than the need for it to be considered against the backdrop of discourses within which it was made, and which made it possible.