Re/reading the past

Critical and functional perspectives on time and value

Editors

J.R. Martin | University of Sydney

Ruth Wodak | University of Vienna

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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).

[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 8] 2003. vi, 277 pp.

Publishing status: Available
Published online on 21 October 2008

https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.8

Table of Contents

Introduction

J.R. Martin and Ruth Wodak | pp. 1–16

I. Constructing time and value: Semiotic resources

Making history: Grammar for interpretation

J.R. Martin | pp. 19–57

II. Recent past: Telling stories

News as history: Your daily gossip

Peter R.R. White | pp. 61–89

Challenging media censoring: Writing between the lines in the face of stringent restrictions

Christine Anthonissen | pp. 91–112

III. Distant past: Making history

The discursive construction of individual memories: How Austrian “Wehrmacht” soldiers remember WWII

Gertraud Benke and Ruth Wodak | pp. 115–138

The languages of the past: On the re-construction of a collective history through individual stories

Florian Menz | pp. 139–175

Orthopraxy, writing and identity: Shaping lives through borrowed genres in Congo

Jan Blommaert | pp. 177–194

History as discourse; discourse as history: “The rise of modern China” — A history exhibition in post-colonial Hong Kong

John Flowerdew | pp. 195–216

IV. Yesteryear: Instilling memories

Reconstruals of the past — settlement or invasion? The role of JUDGEMENT analysis

Caroline Coffin | pp. 219–246

Pearl Harbor in Japanese high school history textbooks: The grammar and semantics of responsibility

Christopher Barnard | pp. 247–271

Index | pp. 273–275

“This volume provides multiple models of approaching historical discourse from a critical perspective, enabling the comparison and evaluation of different approaches to data and frameworks for analysis, as well as encouraging dialogue between CDA and SFL. It is a valuable resource for understanding how texts and contexts interact in the construction of evaluation and interpretation in history.”

Mary J. Schleppegrell, University of California, Davis, USA, in Discourse Studies Vol. 7:3 (2005)

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Re/reading the past

Critical and functional perspectives on time and value

Cited by 73 other publications

Linguistics

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