Discourse
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Illustration: a close-up of a mouth in the film The Big Swallow (1901)
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- Verbal exchange, conversation.
- Verbal expression, either in speech or writing.
- A formal lengthy exposition of some subject, either spoken or written.
- An institutionalized way of thinking, a social boundary defining what can be said about a specific topic (after Michel Foucault).
Discourse (L. discursus, "running to and from") means either written or spoken communication or debate or a formal discussion or debate. The term is often used in semantics and discourse analysis.
In semantics, discourses are linguistic units composed of several sentences; in other words, conversations, arguments, or speeches. In discourse analysis, which came to prominence in the late 1960s, the word "discourse" is shorthand for "discursive formation", which is what Michel Foucault called communication that involves specialized knowledge of various kinds. It is in this sense that the word is most often used in academic studies.
Studies of discourse have been carried out within a variety of traditions that investigate the relations between language, structure and agency, including feminist studies, anthropology, enthnography, cultural studies, literary theory and the history of ideas. Within these fields, the notion of discourse is itself subject to discourse, that is, debated on the basis of specialized knowledge. Discourse can be observed in the use of spoken, written and signed language and multimodal/multimedia forms of communication, and is not found only in 'non-fictional' or verbal materials.
See also
- Foucault's episteme
- Critical discourse analysis
- Political discourse analysis
- Postcolonial literature
- Parrhesia
- Discourse Community
- Analysis of subjective logics
- Interdiscursivity
