Customer Reviews

Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader (Published in association with The Open University)

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This is not really a stand-alone book, as it needs to be read in conjunction with the authors'/editors' companion volume Discourse as Data. Having said that, this Reader offers a very thorough introduction to various disciplines which all, broadly speaking, fall under the umbrella of discourse analysis. Included here are contributions by thinkers in different traditions, including sociolinguistics, Foucauldian discourse analysis, discursive psychology, and more.

The field I found particularly interesting was discursive psychology, but even this represents an umbrella for approaches with different emphases. This book does indeed represent something of that plurality in its section on Minds, Selves and Sense Making. Here we see the re-framing of such topics as emotion or subjectivity, conventionally seen as "interior" phenomena, as well as the more obviously "exterior" forms of "doing" you would expect from a book on discourse.

What this book doesn't always make clear, however, are some of the distinctions (sometimes subtle) between approaches within the same field. For instance, some theorists dealing with discursive psychology apparently see a shift from cognition to discourse as far more decisive than do others. Such distinctions, in my view, sometimes need to be drawn out through other reading.

All-in-all, this book is an absolute treasury of resources drawn from a range of theorists. It may be hard going in places, but this volume is both varied and (given its length) systematic.