CRITICS: CRITIC: Research of Paul Chilton

[DR P A CHILTON]

Paul Chilton,
Reader
Department of French Studies, university of Warwick, Coventry,
CV4 7AL, U.K.
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EARLY WORK Literary text analysis. Then work in Systemic Linguistics
leading to critical discourse analysis, with special reference to
international relations. Publications: Language and the Nuclear Arms
Debate (ed.), Pinter; Orwellian Language and the Media, Pluto Press;
numerous articles on political and international discourse. These
include articles on racism and stereotyping.

CURRENT WORK
In 1988-90 I worked at the Center for International Security and Arms
Control, Stanford, where I prepared the book about to appear with
Peter Lang Publishers (1995): SECURITY METAPHORS. COLD WAR DISCOURSE
FROM CONTAINMENT TO COMMON EUROPEAN HOUSE. This interdisciplinary book
has three parts. The first deals with matters of theory --
linguistic, discourse and international relations theory. It couvers
such matters as political concepts, concepts of state and
sovereignty, the relationship between concepts of the state in Hobbes
and Hobbes's concept of language and attitude towards metaphor. It
outlines a discourse-analytic approach to international relations
discourse, focussing on metaphor. The seocn part examines key texts
in the formative stages of the Cold War, in partcular the lexical and
metaphorical basis of the crucial concept of containment.  It goes on
to examine the perpetuation in discourse of "container" models of the
sovereign state (and ideological "bloc") through the Korean war, the
Cuban missile crisis, and the Vietnam War. It analyses the "Star
Wars" inititative as the "logical" culmination of "container" and
"containment" discourse, destabilizing the  security order based on
"deterrence". Part three thus comes to the ending of the Cold War.
The unravelling of Cold War discourses is seen as deeply influenced by
Gorbachev's modifciation of inter-bloc discourse. In particualr, I
analyse the trans-linguistic migrations of the "European house"
muetaphor, showing its role in the unification of Germany, and how it
was reformulated, largely by U.S. discourse, to yield a security
"architecture" metaphor, which was a vehicle of U.S. hegemony,
through NATO, of potential all-European security systems. With
serious consequences for the current lack of security in several
regions of the continent...

FORTHCOMING WORK I am currently preparing a book for Sage entitled
POLITICAL DISCOURSE, in which I will develop a theory of political
discourse and a discourse theory of politics. I am also editing, for
John Benjamins, a long-standing collection of papers by scholars from
the former USSR, Poland, U.K., former GDR, former Yugoslavia, as well
as western scholars, on the transition in political discourse of the
years 1990- 92. My coeditors are jacob Mey and Mikhail Ilyin.

My approach is committed to precision in the description of
linguistic and pragmatic details, using a cognitive-oriented
framework. I have been particularly interested in the role of
metaphor in concept formation in political discourse.

I look forward to hearing from anyone interested in any of the above
areas.

Paul Chilton