Another approach for analyzing media texts is known as critical discourse analysis. The meaning of signs/codes are also shaped by discourses — basic ways of knowing and thinking constituting the meaning of social practices in specific contexts or social worlds (Gee, 1996). These discourses are more than just language uses. They have to do with larger ideological perspectives that shape how people perceive the world and their own identities. The discourses of law, medicine, religion, business, or education define the social and power relationships within a certain culture or community. People adopting a legal discourse think about the world in a different manner than those adopting a religious discourse.

These discourses serve to define how both language and images have meanings in terms of how they are used in specific contexts, contexts constructed through discourses. James Gee (1996; 1999) argues that understanding how language is being used for social purposes requires an understanding the speaker’s/writer’s social identity and the activity involved. The utterance, “There’s a good movie coming to town this Friday,” can be perceived as simply a description of a fact, a positive appraisal of a movie, or an invitation to join the person to go to the movie. Understanding these meanings requires an understanding of how language is being used and who is using that language in a specific context or social worlds. These social worlds are often constituted by certain discourses. For example, a religious discourse constitutes the world of a religious ceremony while a business discourse constitutes the world of economic transactions. In some cases, a discourse from one world is imposed on another world, as when a business discourse of “accountability” and “bottom-line results” is imposed onto education. This discourse of “business” or “marketing” reflects an ideological orientation towards a world that values profit, “the bottom line,” marketing, etc. In the Wall Street world of Michael Douglas in the film, Wall Street, practices associated with achieving wealth are more important than practices associated with friendships or community contributions. Images of limo’s, plush corporate offices, tailored suits, etc., serve as status markers of wealth and prestige valued in this world.

Critical discourse analysis is useful for analyzing the social and ideological influence of these worlds on people’s practices in these worlds, as well as the roles and stances they assume. In a world of the romance novel or film, the characters and their practices are constituted by a discourse of romance.

Gee (1996; 1999) Children learn certain basic “primary discourses” at an early age within their family context. As adolescents, they later acquire various “secondary discourses” as they move into institutions employing these discourses. For example, in school, they are exposed to discourses of science, social studies, literary criticism, cultural analysis, math, sports, etc., as different ways of knowing and thinking about the world. Each of these discourses represents a different way of thinking about the world.

Gee argues that these discourses also serves as “identity tool-kits” to define one’s identities, for example, the discourse of the law serves to define one’s identity as a lawyer. A “biker” discourse serves to define the meaning of images of a biker. A student may become a “science whiz” who can think in terms of scientific analysis of phenomena in ways that defines their identity. Or, they may become a “sports nut” who constantly thinks in terms of sports statistics. Gee notes that a discourse of the elementary school defines the identities of elementary school teachers talk and act.

In literature, characters adopt voices or social languages that reflect tensions between certain discourses associated with their membership in different worlds. Bakhtin (1981) gives the example of the narrator of Dickens’ Little Dorrit who employs two different languages to describe a character’s actions:

“The conference was held at four or five o’clock in the afternoon, when all the region of Harley Street, Cavendish Square, was resonant of carriage-wheels and double-knocks. It had reached this point when Mr. Merle came home from his daily occupation of causing the British name to be more and more respected in all parts of the civilized globe capable of appreciation of world-wide commercial enterprise and gigantic combinations of skill and capital.” (p. 94).

The language in italics mimics the language of political rhetoric that is set against the language of narrative description of the setting, which evokes a world of busy, domestic upper-class life. This creates tensions between different evoked discourse worlds — the world of political power and the world of domestic life. In reflecting on their responses to tensions between these discourses, students may define connections to tensions between their own beliefs.

Discourses also define what is considered to be “normal” in a social world. Media texts reflect what Antonio Gramsci (1971) described as hegemony—dominant modes of thinking or believing that permeate a world or society that define the “common sense” status quo. Within a discourse context, readers are positioned as able and willing to apply common sense assumptions necessary for a coherent interpretation of texts, coherence that is ideologically defined. For Norman Fairclough (1995):

what establishes the coherent link between the two sentences “She’s giving up her job next Wednesday. She’s pregnant” is the assumption that women cease to work when they have children. In so far as interpreters take up these positions and automatically make these connections, they are being subjected by and to the text, and this is the important part of the ideological “work” of texts and discourse in “interpolating subjects” (84).

As demonstrated in the analyses of institutions in history by one of the most important discourse theorists, Michel Foucault, discourses served to create “common sense” perspectives associated with institutional power. For example, during the 19th century, notions of “madness” and “hysteria” were used by male doctors to construct a whole institutional structure for defining females in ways that represented them as deviant, the application of a medical or “scientific” discourse, fused with a discourse of masculinity (Hall, 1997).

Discourses serve to define identities and allegiances to certain institutions. In a study of high school students who were active in the world of the Mormon Church, Oates (2000) found that these students employed discourses in ways that defined their identities within social relationships. One female participant consistently employed the discourses of intimacy and disclosure in her journal writing in which consistently described her feelings about everyday events and relationships. Her mother also contributed to this journal, expressing her own intimate relationship to her daughter. Oates notes that her "literacy practices functioned as intimate disclosures to construct and sustain relationships of loyalty and trust" (p, 228) associated with the construction of her identity.

Oates identified the discourses of entitlement and authority in a male participant's writing. This male was highly active in the Mormon Church's youth organization and sought to be a member of a leadership training organization within the Church. When he was not selected as a member of this group, he used his journal entries to vent his frustrations, arguing that he was entitled to be selected. He also adopted a highly judgmental, authoritative stance towards peers who were selected. In his writing in his religion class in school, he drew on the discourses of the Mormon Church to posit authoritative stances against practices, such as reading offensive literature, that violated Church doctrine. Oates argues that adopting these discourses of entitlement and authority were related to establishing his identity within her peer group and church as a devout church member.

Critical discourse analysis also focuses on power or sense of agency. In his analysis of a discourse of racism as evident in a parliamentary debate, Teun Van Dijk notes that it is important to examine how power relationships operate in institutions as constituted by discourses of race:

Unequal access to social resources is enacted, at a more local, interactional level, in terms of specific social practices of dominant group members and their organizations and institutions, that is, by various forms of discrimination, such as problematization, marginalization, limitation and exclusion in everyday social contexts. Thus, among many other forms of discrimination, 'foreigners' are unable or have more difficulty to get into the country, the city, the neighborhood, the club, or the family, or to get adequate residence, housing, jobs, information, attention, or coverage in the press and textbooks.

Relevant for our discussion is that among these many social resources, also the symbolic resource of public discourse plays an important role: Politics, the media, education, scholarship, literature, the courts, the welfare system, and businesses and their multitudes of forms of text and talk are largely controlled by white elites. Minorities have only very limited access to, or control over such discourses. In other words, they have less power also because they literally have less to say -- that is, they are given less opportunities to speak, write and be heard or read publicly.

This fundamentally also implies that they have less control over their representation in discourse, that is, over what is being said and written about them and how this is done. This finally means that they have less control over public opinion and other socially shared cognitive representations about them.

These social representations may be acquired in many ways, but the most effective means is discourse : Most white people in European societies acquire and develop more beliefs about minorities through text and talk in politics, the media, literature, or textbooks, than through (usually limited) everyday observation and interaction with members of minority groups. This is especially the case for the more general, abstract beliefs of attitudes and ideologies, that is, for shared social representations, but hardly less true for information about specific events, that is, for so-called mental models .

Critical Discourse Analysis of Media Texts and Audience Response

Discourses also function to position or orient people to adopt certain practices valued in a certain social world. The concept of “orienting discourses” suggests the ways in which discourses of gender, class, and race position people to adopt certain practices valued in certain contexts. Louis Althusser (1971) argued that audiences are “hailed” or recruited by these value stances as potential “authors” who may adopt those value stances. A discourse of sexism often constitutes talk on certain talk-radio programs that serves to position male audiences to define their identities in terms of masculine values.

People are “hailed” by certain discourses and construct their identities based on their subjective alignment with how they are positioned by these discourses. For example, students in a college-bound, AP English class may be positioned to adopt certain discourses associated with a set of class dispositions and academic status in the school.

Discourses position audiences by assuming that those audiences accept or buy into dominant or “hegemonic” ideological perspectives sponsored by those in power. For example, a news broadcast that presupposes a certain unstated ideological perspective may position audiences to accept that perspective as “common sense.” For example, a news story about testing in schools may presuppose the prevailing ideological assumption for many in power that “testing” and “accountability” are positive means for improving education.

Click here for a discussion by John Fiske on how discourses “hail” or position audiences.

Discourses of Gender, Class, and Race

Audiences draw on discourses of gender, class, and race differences to construct discourse contexts and their social identities within those contexts. The largely male sports talk-show is constituted by a discourse of masculine gender identity that values the sharing of technical expertise about players, rules, and “stats.” Participants also celebrate the value of competitiveness and hard work, and generally avoid topics related to emotional, interpersonal matters associated with the “feminine” television talk shows. Adopting these practices serves to define program participants and their audiences as allied to a discourse of masculinity.

One gender discourses is the discourses of romance. From their experiences with romance novels, soap operas, song lyrics, and personal relationships, readers acquire a discourse of romance or what Linda Christian-Smith describes as a “discourse of desire.” The language of this discourse is typically that of an idealized, often hyperbolic description of the desired partner or lover. For example, song lyrics often contain males' use of a “sweet-talk” language of flirtation that plays on the idea of females’ desirability. An underlying ideological assumption behind this discourse is that “love triumphs over all” — that the emotional feeling or pleasure of love is a transcendent experience.

In some forms, discourses of romance celebrate “codes of beautification” —that being physically attractive contributes to building a love relationship (Christian-Smith). These codes specify norms as to what constitutes “being beautiful” as defined by the cosmetics, fashion, and hair-product “beauty industry.” In responding to romance novels, early adolescent readers were more likely than adult readers to value hero or heroine’s physical appearance as opposed to their personality attributes or intelligence (Willinsky & Hunniford).

More erotic forms of this discourse downplay physical portrayal of sex in favor of emotional descriptions of passionate romance occurring in exotic settings. However, the discourses constituting these descriptions still represent a patriarchal perspective. Analysis of the metaphors employed in sixteen recently published romance novels found a high frequency of references to war and violence in descriptions of male “conquest” of females as in, “‘He was a war-horse straining at the reins, all leashed power and trembling readiness’” (Patthey-Chavez, Clare, and Youmans, 91).

Brett Dellinger, Critical Discourse Analysis

Sue McGregor: Critical Discourse Analysis: A Primer

Teun Van Dijk, Racist Discourses

Norman Fairclough: critical discourse analysis papers, particularly on the application of business discourses to education

Foucault: theory.org site

Allen Luke: discussion of critical discourse analysis

Further Discussion of Media, Gender, and Identity

Tracy Weeks, North Carolina State University, a critical discourse analysis of social studies webquests

Currie, D. (1999). Girl talk: Adolescent magazines and their readers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Enciso, P. (1998). Good/bad girls read together: Pre-adolescent girls’ co-authorship of feminine subject positions during a shared reading event. English Education, 30, 44-62.

Finders, M. (1997). Just girls. New York: Teachers College Press.

McRobbie, A. (2000). Feminism and youth culture. New York: Routledge.

Newkirk, T. (2002). Misreading masculinity: Boys, literacy, and popular culture. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Nixon, S. (1996). Hard looks: Masculinities, spectatorship and contemporary consumption. London, UCL Press.

Discourses of class

Discourses of class are most evident in peoples’ perceptions and judgments of members of different classes. Discourses of class serve to define the meaning of social practices or artifacts as class markers. Neo-Marxist criticism is interested the ways in which storylines and themes reflect certain economic, social, and political forces. It examines how discourses or ideologies of class serve to maintain or challenge power structures. For example, a film may portray workers as industrious and loyal to their company despite their poor working conditions and low pay, a portrayal that serves to define the role of the worker in society as needing to sacrifice without challenging the system that fosters poor working conditions and low wages in the power structure.

Neo-Marxist criticism is also interested in how audiences are socialized or indoctrinated into becoming consumers. It perceives advertising as a form of propaganda designed to perpetuate the value of consumption as a means of defining one’s identity in society through the uses and display of consumer products.

Neo-Marxist analysis is also interested in how people acquire what is defined as “cultural capital” — defined as social practices or styles or ways of expressing oneself through language, dress, gestures, or social practices associated with class or social status in society (Bourdieu, 1977). For example, certain “marked” ways of speaking based on cultural assumptions about dialects, register, pitch, topic elaboration, intonation, hedging, etc., serve to define one as having or not having “cultural capital,” a theme of the film, Educating Rita. Cultural capital is associated with knowledge of certain “texts” — literature, art, film, etc., or with academic credentials deemed to be markers of “high” social status.

Notions of what constitute class differences themselves reflect discourses of class. Different people have different notions as to what it means to be “middle class” or “working class.” In the PBS documentary program, People Like Us, different theorists propose different models for class differences.

Adolescents from different classes may judge others according to very different criteria derived from their class background. In research conducted by James Gee, he found that upper middle class adolescent females were highly judgmental of their peers in terms of behaving in an appropriate manner consistent with social norms: wearing the “right” clothes, using the “right” language, or displaying appropriate social practices. In contrast, working class adolescent females focused more on concern about immediate interpersonal relationships and issues of fairness in those relationships.

The teacher’s resource guide for People Like Us contains a lot of activities related to defining the meaning of class.

For further information on class and income see: Social Class and Poverty.

Students could also example how certain artifacts — clothes, possessions (cars, houses, etc.), viewing/reading habits, food, etc. — serve as class markers, as discussed in the article on uniforms as class markers: “Pride, prejudice and the not-so-subtle politics of the working class” by Katherine Boo, published in The Washington Post.

One useful set of objects for analysis are print or on-line catalogues for stores that market to different types of social class groups, groups that they attempt to construct through their semiotic uses of images and audience appeals. For example, the Neiman Marcus catalogue markets to an up-scale, upper-middle class market.

In contrast, the Walter Drake catalogue markets to more of a middle-class audience.

In his study of the WWF wrestling programs, Henry Jenkins (1997) argues that wrestling represents “working-class melodrama” in that it portrays the revenge of “good” against “evil” — the “bad” wrestler who employs devious means is overcome at the end by the “good” wrestler. Audiences who resent the power and wealth of the elite identify with the “good” wrestler, who represents the “little guy” asserting themselves against the “unfair” power structure.

An introduction to the application of discourses of class to media

Discourses of media production

Discourses also shape the nature of media production — ideological orientations as to how television or film should be produced. For example, Brett Dellinger analyzed the ways in which American commercial television talk shows apply a discourse of concision — the idea that talk and ideas need to be produced in a relatively fast-paced mode, or audiences will be bored. Producers and hosts attempt to “keep things moving,” so that thoughtful, complex analysis is often minimized given the need to maintain a fast-paced production:

Neo-Marxist critics have also examined the ways in which media production is controlled by large media conglomerates who attempt to impose their own ideological control over the media texts they produce.

Werner Meier, Media Ownership – Does It Matter?

For example, analysis of Disney films and theme parks indicates a consistent pattern of sanitizing traditional fairy tale stories and characters based on a discourse of Western, White, middle-class values.

Click here for interviews with Henry Giroux and others on the Disney monopoly of children’s cultural perceptions.

For example, analysis of Disney films and theme parks indicates a consistent pattern of sanitizing traditional fairy tale stories and characters based on a discourse of Western, white, middle-class values.

An introduction to Marxism by Dino Felluga

Greig Henderson and Christopher Brown: Glossary of Marxist criticism

Click here for extensive material on Marx.

John Harms and Douglas Kellner, Toward A Critical Theory of Advertising

Webquest: Effects of the Industrial Revolution

For further reading on discourses of class:

Christopher, R. (1999). Teaching working-class literature to mixed audiences. In S. L. Linkon (Ed.), Teaching working class (pp. 203–222). Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

Easton, T., & Lutzenberger, J. (1999). Difficult dialogues: Working-class studies in a multicultural literature classroom. In S. L. Linkon (Ed.), Teaching working class (pp. 267–285). Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

Gee, J. P., Allen, A., & Clinton, K. (2001). Language, class, and identity: Teenagers fashioning themselves through language. Linguistics and Education 12 (2) 175-194.

Gibson-Graham, J., Resnick, S., & Wolff, R., (Eds). (2000). Introduction. Class and its others. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hemphill, L. (1999). Narrative style, social class, and response to poetry. Research in the Teaching of English, 33 (3), 275–302.

Hull, G. & Rose, M. (1990). “This wooden shack place:” The logic of an unconventional reading. College Composition and Communication, 41, 287–298.

Discourses of race

In a move that is consistent with critical literacy theories, Bonilla-Silva (2001) proposes an alternative conception of racism as “racialized social systems” that function to place people in hierarchical social categories and then assign meanings to groups based on economic or political power in ways that serve to maintain and justify these hierarchies, particularly in terms of discourses of whiteness (Cuomo & Hall, 1999; Delgado & Stefanic, 1997; Roediger, 2002; Fine, Weis, Powell, & Wong, 1997). For example, psychological discourses of race that focus on individuals only as “racist”/”prejudiced” presupposes that racism is an “individual” problem. Contemporary “race-talk” discourses are often disassociated from racism as a past, historical phenomenon. For example, White students may adopt a discourse of “color-blind racism” to avoid being labeled as “racist,” as evident in statements such as “Everyone is equal, but . . . ” or “I am not prejudiced, but . . . ”, in arguments such as “I didn’t own slaves, so I’m not a racist,” or in denials of structural nature of discrimination as reflected in critiques of affirmative action programs (Blum, 2002; Wiegman, 1999), a discourse fails to examine the forces of institutional racism (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001).

The power of prevailing discourses of Whiteness is reflected in an ethnographic study by Pamela Perry (2001) of white students’ perceptions of their own identities and white culture from two different California high school schools: Valley Groves High School (VG), a largely white, suburban school, and Clavey High School (C), a highly diverse school with African-Americans as the majority group. In these two schools, White students had totally different perceptions of their own cultural identities. VG students, who had little exposure to racial differences, adopted a race-neutral perspective, constructing White, Euro-American culture as the norm. Students of color at VG “rarely acted culturally different from the white students” (p. 122). Nor did they challenge the White students, so any potential challenge was neutralized. The White students imposed their identities onto the students of color, so that their own sense of Whiteness was therefore an “empty cultural category” that only served to define an “us/them” or “White/majority” vs. “ethic/minority” distinction. In contrast, at C, race was the “principle of social organization.” White students at C had a clear sense of their White identity as “White.” At C, racism was defined in terms of “history and consequences of white racial oppressions and inequality that white students well understood” (p. 65). Another school ethnography of a diverse Toronto high school (Yon, 2000) finds that Whiteness was also an unacknowledged norm, resulting in the fact that students believed that they are now disadvantaged and excluded because other racial groups receive special attention. As a result, they “simultaneously resist, accommodate, and become ambivalent toward the discourses of multiculturalism, antiracism, and inclusivity all at the same time” (p. 30).

White students may adopt a value stance of White privilege operating in the school or community, particularly when challenged by alternative discourses of race (Blake, 1998; Fecho, 1998; Kumashiro, 2002; Smith & Strickland, 2001). Some of this backlash stems from White students’ assumption that their perspective is the presumed community norm (Keating, 1995; Trainor, 2002), an assumption which can be unwittingly fostered by White teachers (Chapman, 2003; Lewis, Ketter & Fabos, 2001; Ketter & Lewis, 2001)). White students may assume that the norm of Whiteness operates through a discourse of ordered academic analysis set against what may be perceived of as unwarranted expressions of subjective perceptions that do not belong in the classroom. As Barnett (2000) notes, “discourses of ‘whiteness’ establish themselves as the norm through their reliance on particularly forms of ‘rationality’...a term that highlights another attribute often credited to ‘whiteness,’ it’s dependency on rules, order, and formal institutional structures” (p. 16), structures that may parallel discourses of order and control operating in the school.

For further reading on discourses of race:

Barnett, T. (2000). Reading “whiteness” in English studies. College English, 63 (1), 9–37.

Beach, R. (1997). Students’ resistance to engagement with multicultural literature. In T. Rogers & A. O. Soter (Eds.), Reading across cultures: Teaching literature in a diverse society (pp. 69–94). New York: Teachers College Press.

Blake, B. E. (1998). “Critical” reader response in an urban classroom: Creating cultural texts to engage diverse readers. Theory Into Practice, 37 (3), 238–243.

Blum, L. (2002). “I’m not a racist, but . . . ”: The moral quandary of race. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Cuomo, C., & Hall, K. (Eds.). (1999). Whiteness: Critical philosophical reflections. Latham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (Eds.). (1997). Critical white studies: Looking beyond the mirror. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2001). Critical race theory: An introduction. New York: New York University Press.

Fecho, B. (1998). Crossing boundaries of race in a critical literacy classroom. In D. Alvermann, K. Hinchman, D. Moore, S. Phelps, & D. Waff (Eds.), Reconceptualizing the literacies in adolescents’ lives (pp. 75–101). Mahwah. NJ: Erlbaum.

Fine, M., Weis, L, Powell, L., & Wong, L. (Eds.). 1997. Off white: Readings in race, power, and society. New York: Routledge.

Lewis, C. (2000). Limits of identification: The personal, pleasurable, and the critical in reader response. Journal of Literacy Research, 32 (2), 253–266.

Roediger, D. R. (2002). Colored white: Transcending the racial past. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Rogers, T., & Soter, A. (1997). Reading across cultures: Teaching literature in a diverse society. New York: Teachers College Press. vTrainor, J. (2002). Critical Pedagogy’s “Other”: Constructions of Whiteness in Education for Social Change. College Composition and Communication, 53(4), 631–650.

Yon, D.A. (2000). Elusive Culture: Schooling, race, and identity in global times. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press

For further reading on analysis of race in the media

Biagi, S., & Kern-Foxworth, M. (1997). Facing difference: Race, gender, and mass media. New York: Pine Forge Press.

Boyd, T. (1996). Am I Black enough for you? Popular culture from the hood and beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Carson, D., & Friedman, L. (1995). Shared differences: Multicultural media and practical pedagogy. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Cottle, S. (2000). Ethnic minorities and the media: Changing cultural boundaries. London: Open University Press.

Dine, G., & Humez, J. M. (Eds.). (1995). Gender, race and class in media: A text-reader. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Entman, R., & Rojecki, A. (2001). The Black image in the White mind: Media and race in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ferguson, R. (1998). Representing race: Ideology, identity and the media. London: Arnold.

Fiske, J. (1996). Media matters: Race and gender in U.S. politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Garcia Berumen, F. (1995). The Chicano/Hispanic image in American film. New York: Vantage.

Giroux, H. (1998). Channel surfing: Race talk and the destruction of today's youth. New York: Griffin Trade.

Gutierrez, F., & Wilson, C. (1995). Race, multiculturalism, and the media: From mass to class communication. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Holtzman, L. (2000). Media messages : What film, television, and popular music teach us about race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. New York: M.E. Sharpe.

Kamalipour, Y, & Carilli, T. (1998). Cultural diversity and the U.S. media. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Kellstedt, P. (2003). The mass media and the dynamics of American racial attitudes. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Lester, P. (1996). Images that injure. New York: Praeger.

Negra, C. (2001). Off-White Hollywood American culture and ethnic female stardom. New York: Routledge.

Critical discourse analysis applied to film/media:

Cary, L. J. (2000). Redemption, desire and discourse: The unapparent teacher in education. Proceedings of
the Internationalization of Curriculum Studies, Baton Rouge, LA.

A study of the discourses associated with the valorization of films (often in terms of directors’ popularity):

Yosso, T. (2002). Critical race media literacy: Challenging deficit discourse about Chicanas/os. Journal of Popular Film and Television, Spring.

For further reading on critical discourses analysis of the media:

Bell, A., & Garrett, P., eds. (1998). Approaches to media discourse. London: Blackwell Publishers.

Fairclough, N. (1995). Media Discourse. London: Arnold.

Gee, J. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. Bristol, PA: Taylor& Francis.

Hall, S., ed. (1997). Representation: Cultural representation and signifying practices. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Lemke, J. (1995). Textual politics: Discourse and social dynamics. Bristol, PA: Taylor& Francis.

van Dijk T. A. (1993). Elite discourses and racism. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Module 4: Word document

Applying Critical Perspectives to an Ad

Rhetorical/Audience Analysis

Semiotic Theory

Poststructuralist/ DeconstructivistTheory: Interrogating Language Codes/Categories

Critical Discourse Analysis

Psychoanalytic Theories

Feminist Criticism

Postmodern Theory

Postcolonial Theory

References