Critical Theory

6 Key excerpts on "Critical Theory"

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  eBook - ePub

  Critical Applied Linguistics

  A Critical Introduction

  • Alastair Pennycook(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3) is concerned with a critique of ways in which language perpetuates inequitable social relations. From the point of view of studies of language and gender, the issue is not merely to describe how language is used differently along gendered lines but to use such an analysis as part of social critique and transformation. A central element of critical applied linguistics, therefore, is a way of exploring language in social contexts that goes beyond mere correlations between language and society and instead raises more critical questions to do with access, power, disparity, desire, difference, and resistance. It also insists on an historical understanding of how social relations came to be the way they are.

  Critical Theory

  One way of taking up such questions has been through the work known as Critical Theory, a tradition of work linked to the Frankfurt School and such thinkers as Adorno, Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and currently Jürgen Habermas. A great deal of critical social theory, at least in the Western tradition, has drawn in various ways on this reworking of Marxist theory to include more complex understandings of, for example, ways in which the Marxist concept of ideology relates to psychoanalytic understandings of the subconscious, how aspects of popular culture are related to forms of political control, and how particular forms of positivism and rationalism have come to dominate other possible ways of thinking. At the very least, this body of work reminds us that critical applied linguistics needs at some level to engage with the long legacy of Marxism, neo-Marxism, and its many counterarguments. Critical work in this sense has to engage with questions of inequality, injustice, rights, and wrongs.

  Looking more broadly at the implications of this line of thinking, we might say that critical here means taking social inequality and social transformation as central to one’s work. Marc Poster (1989) suggests that “Critical Theory springs from an assumption that we live amid a world of pain, that much can be done to alleviate that pain, and that theory has a crucial role to play in that process” (p. 3). I am reminded here of a moment recounted by Habermas, the prolific heir to this critical tradition, when he went to visit Herbert Marcuse, his predecessor and author of such classic works as One Dimensional Man.

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  An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis in Education

  • Rebecca Rogers, Rebecca Rogers(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  A shared assumption among allied traditions in CST is that confronting inequality means coming to terms with the social arrangements that create social disparities and understanding their root sources. The project of critique (through our theory, practice, and reflection) provides us with a framework or a set of tools which help us penetrate to the core of domination, whether it is based in racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism or neocolonialism. This includes a language of critique—puncturing “regimes of truth,” noticing and naming structures, conditions, and manifestations of domination (however small or large). It is important to note that while critique is an important part of the “critical project” it is not the end goal. The end goal is to hope, to dream, and to create alternative realities that are based in equity, love, peace, and solidarity. Thus, a critical project is necessarily based in what Giroux (1983) calls the language of hope or Leonardo (2004) calls the “language of transcendence” (p. 11). This is the generative side of the critical project. Rather than only resisting, critiquing, and reacting to domination, those inspired by critical social theory, seek, in addition, to design and forge alternative ways of representing, being, and interacting in the world with the goal of creating a society free of oppression and domination. Considering Discourse in Critical Discourse Analysis People seek to make meaning with every aspect of who they are and what they are doing: how they use their bodies; integrate objects, artifacts, and technology; use gestures, time, and space; adjust their tone of voice when they speak; choose the words they use; and interact in particular ways with others. Thus, meanings are made through representational systems—language being just one of the sign systems people use to create meanings. Meanings are always embedded within social, historical, political, and ideological contexts. And, meanings are motivated

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  The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics

  • James Simpson, James Simpson(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Critical Discourse Analysis, the investigation of how ‘language use may be affirming and indeed reproducing the perspectives, values and ways of talking of the powerful, which may not be in the interests of the less powerful’.

  Language development as it relates to individual neurological and psychological processes, and to the broader social context, is the focus of the following three chapters. Elisabeth Ahlsén notes that Neurolinguistics, the study of language and the brain, is a truly interdisciplinary pursuit, involving neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, speech pathology and biology. Its relevance to therapy in particular makes it an applied linguistic concern. In his chapter Psy-cholinguistics, John Field explores some familiar territory for applied linguistics, as he examines the cognitive processes at play in language use and acquisition. Sociocultural and Cultural-Historical Theories of Language Development, explain Steven Thorne and Thomas Tasker, view mental development as fundamentally constructed through ‘engagement with cultural practices, artifacts, and milieus’. This understanding of language development stresses the relationship between an individual's development and ‘the social and material conditions of everyday life, including those comprising formal instructional settings’.

  Sociolinguistics – the topic of the chapter by Carmen Llamas – is itself a broad field of language study, and concerns language in social contexts, language change and variation, and the signalling and interpretation of meaning in interaction, all matters of central relevance and connection to applied linguistics. Janet Maybin and Karin Tusting write on Linguistic Ethnography, a fast-growing area which combines ethnography with linguistics and other strategies to investigate social processes. Perhaps because of its emic perspective and sensitivity to contextual features, linguistic ethnography is emerging as a key paradigm for investigating language in use in the world today. Doris Warriner adopts an approach to Literacy which also regards language and literacy practices as contextually situated. Such practices – as she says – can be seen not as problems but as resources ‘which might be differentially valued and supported depending on situation, place, audience, and goals’. Finally, in this section Stylistics

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  Doing Research Projects in Marketing, Management and Consumer Research

  • Chris Hackley(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This need not be thought of in pejorative terms: it can be seen as a necessary truth of capitalist activity. In competitive markets organizations cannot rely on monopolistic market conditions to protect their profits but they can and do try to create quasi-monopolies through branding. In an important sense Nike, Coca Cola or Kodak have a monopoly over their respective brands. If they can persuade consumers to seek out their brand and ignore competitors, then they have in effect created a kind of monopolistic market situation. Marketing organizations try to create a competitive advantage by differentiating their brand(s) from those of competitors. They use their purchasing power to source cheaper, better-quality components and ingredients, their economic and technological power to make production more cost efficient, and their huge advertising budgets to promote their products’ attributes and to make their brands memorable to the consuming public. Corporate power is implicit in all kinds of commercial success. Whether this power is exercised for good or for ill is a matter for individuals to decide. Critical research in general seeks to open up such issues so that they can be properly considered.

  Glossary

  Constitutive Language is said to constitute its objects rather than merely refer to them. Language actively constructs the meaning of terms and concepts. In the context of power, constitutive power refers to power that is reproduced in and through particular discourses. Language and discourse are said to actively constitute relations of power and not simply to reflect them. Constitutive power is intrinsic to social interaction.

  Conversation analysis Associated with ethnomethodology, conversation analysis takes a minute and detailed interest in the way that everyday interactions are ordered, produced and controlled. It has been widely used in positivistic research to document particular interactions. Topics of study have included the role of pauses in conversations and the negotiation of turn-taking and conversational topics in telephone conversations.

  Discourse In common usage, a dialogue between speakers. In interpretive social research ‘discourse’ means ‘that which can be described’; it is a broad term that refers to sets of conventions for talking or thinking about a given object or idea.

  Emancipation The critical research stance is that discourses can be repressive. In its moderate form ‘emancipation’ refers to the critical research aim of promoting reflexive awareness about the ways in which ideologies are formed and reproduced.

  Ethnomethodology

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  Language, Gender and Ideology

  Constructions of Femininity for Marriage

  • Saumya Sharma(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge India

    (Publisher)

  The fundamental idea was that the texts contained some kind of “signification in social structure” (Fowler et al. 1979: 96), which could be understood from three basic assumptions. Any linguistic process in a text could be analysed in relation to one of the three functions (ideational, interpersonal and textual) of language given by Halliday; a systematic analysis of what occurs in speech or writing is dependent on social rules, the choices made by the participants and their purposes, and that meanings are syntactically embedded in texts, hence analysis required decoding these meanings to understand the social relations of power and ideology through the texts. Critical linguists did not claim that an analysis of society could be done solely through an analysis of language but that language was one of the focal points for analysis, for it was thoroughly a social phenomenon. Ideological representation and power dynamics could also be seen through material practices of social institutions, and this aspect was later included in Fairclough’s arguments in CDA. Moreover, a critical linguistic analysis was considered an interpretative exercise that could be conducted by critical examiners unlike the uncritical masses who were conditioned by social norms to think and behave in particular ways (Fowler et al. 1979). Thus, the critic’s evaluation was favoured, and a dichotomy was created which is also broadly implicit in most of CDA. In fact, CDA works on an avowedly political stance, championing the cause of the oppressed, yet it assumes a simple unproblematic relationship between the text and reader. The issue of readers’ responses is largely not given attention in CDA (Breeze 2011), and that is why there is a need to examine the responses, for they will reveal the ways in which media affects individuals, whether they support, resist or question social beliefs and to what extent their views are similar to that of the critical analyst.

  Interdisciplinarity and goals

  Teun van Dijk (1985b) is of the view that during the 1960s and 1970s, many disciplines such as pragmatics, text linguistics, anthropology, semiotics, narratology, literary criticism and sociolinguistics led to the emergence of a distinct discipline called discourse analysis/discourse studies. Van Dijk (2008) asserts that discourse studies has a lot in common with CDS because they are both interested in examining language in the following ways:

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  Critical Discourse Studies and/in Communication

  Theories, Methodologies, and Pedagogies at the Intersections

  • Susana Martínez Guillem, Christopher Toula, Susana Martínez Guillem, Christopher M. Toula(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  and beyond—that, informed by critical humanism, places the struggle for more equal societies,as well as the(limited)role of the critic in this project,at the fore-front of inquiry. Thus, whereas in CDS literature, the debates surrounding issues such as reflexivity, critique, or the mediated relationship between texts and objects are relatively recent, many scholars in communication studies have been historically attuned to the triple crisis “in representation, legitimation, and praxis,” and the consequent need to acknowledge the fundamental ways “the self”—researcher, reader, speaker—shapes knowledge. 32 Although with different emphases, both bodies of scholarship are thus suit-able partners in a perspective that emphasizes“language as activity,”as well as the“history of language” 33 in its quest to account for the intrinsic, contradictory, and multilayered relationships between societal dispositions and specific discursive practices. 34 Despite their a priori philosophical compatibilities, one of the main obstacles disconnecting the trajectories of CDS and these critical perspectives in communication studies stems from the perceived tension between method-driven analysis, and theory-driven critique

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