Re/reading the past : critical and functional perspectives on time and value / edited by J.R. Martin, Ruth Wodak.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Martin, J. R.

Wodak, Ruth, 1950-

Series:

Discourse approaches to politics, society, and culture ; v. 8.

Discourse approaches to politics, society, and culture, 1569-9463 ; v. 8

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Discourse analysis, Narrative.

History--Philosophy.

History.

Physical Description:

lxxix, 283 p.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam ; Philadelphia : John Benjamins Pub., 2003.

Summary:

Re/reading the Past is concerned with the discourses of history, from the complementary perspectives of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The papers in the book stress the discursive construction of the past, focussing on the different social narratives which compete for official acknowledgement. Issues of collective and cultural memory are addressed, reflecting the "linguistic turn" in the Social Sciences. The book covers a range of discourses, interpreting texts from popular culture to academic discourse including the construction and evaluation of past events in a variety of places around the world. It is especially timely in its focus on the construction of time and value in a post-colonial world where history discourses are central to on-going processes of reconciliation, debates on war crimes, and the issues of amnesty and restitution. As such the book fills a significant gap in interdisciplinary debates as well as in register and genre analysis, and will be of general interest to historians, political scientists and discourse analysts as well as students and teachers of ESP (English for Specific Purposes) and EAP (English for Academic Purposes).

Contents:

Re/reading the past

Editorial page

Title page

LCC page

Table of contents

Introduction

Aims and scope

SFL perspectives

CDA perspectives

Discourses on/about history

History as discourse

Preview

References

Part I. Constructing time and value

Making history

Past in present

Whose history?

Marking time

Abstraction

Cause

Value

Arguing

Mapping histories

Deconstructing history

More to history

Notes

Texts cited

Part II. Recent past

News as history

The issues reports, genre structure and patterns of evaluation

Event stories and patterns of evaluation

The rhetorical functionality of the standard news report

Conclusion: News as narrative or gossip

Challenging media censoring

Language as a medium in reporting news

Contextual information

The functions of news reports

The functions of news reports generally

The functions of censorship

The functions of news reports which defy censorship

The form of news reports which defy censorship

Linguistic theory in analysis of news reports

Relating form to function in specific censorship-defying texts

Visibly crossing out potentially offensive words and phrases (see Figure 2)

Direct reference to the restrictions

indirect reference to restricted material (see Figure 3)

Verbal as opposed to visual images (see Figure 4)

Part III. Distant past

The discursive construction of individual memories

The construction of history

Methodology

The strategies surveyed

The strategy of ``claiming victim-hood''

The strategy of ``knowledge maintenance''

The strategy of positive self-construction

Strategic agency

The languages of the past.

Introduction

Theoretical framework

Historical survey

Setting and content of the TV discussion

Strategies in the presentation of different historical views

The term Austro-Fascism as a membership categorisation device

The German Wehrmacht

Turning stories into history: The role of the moderator

Conclusion

Orthopraxy, writing and identity

Orthopraxy and having a life

Two histories

Borrowed genres

The relocation of resources and functions

Conclusion: Orthopraxy, genre and subjectivity

Note

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

discourse as history

Background

History and national identity

Preferred readings

Analysis

Conditions of production

Textual analysis

Selection of texts

A transformational model of text selection

The language of the texts

Conditions of reception

Part IV. Yesteryear

Reconstruals of the past - settlement or invasion?

Introduction. Approaches to history as a discursive practice: The role of evaluation

Systems for giving value to the past: A systemic linguistic perspective

Judging the past

Reconstruals of the past - settlement or invasion? (A judgement analysis)

Patterns of judgement in school history narratives: `Objectivity' as a rhetorical effect

The contemporary history classroom - tools for revaluing the past

Conclusion: The value of `value' tools

Pearl Harbor in Japanese high school history textbooks

Background to the history controversy in Japan

Data and methodology

Participants and processes

Primacy of meaning

Recapitulation

Statistical analysis

Attacker and Attack

References.

Examples from the following textbooks have been quoted in this paper

Index

The series DISCOURSE APPROACHES TO POLITICS, SOCIETY AND CULTURE.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612160806

9781282160804

128216080X

9789027296023

9027296022

OCLC:

314773784