Truth

[beaugrande]

JF Delannoy
 
In my view , discourse analysis does not dispute ‘truth’, though some radical deconstructionists, whom I deconstructed in Critical Discourse (1988) did, and have been at times been thrown in. What we ‘analyse’ our the discourse moves of presenting something as absolute truth to impose closure, viz.
 
Cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object. [
] It is obvious that the new Citroën has fallen from the sky inasmuch as it appears at first sight as a superlative object; [
] one can easily see in an object the best messenger of a world above that of nature: at once a perfection and an absence of origin, a closure and a brilliance, a transformation of life into matter
 (Barthes The New Citroën, 1957)
 
My New Introduction (2004), also on the web, esp. Ch VII, is stuffed with truths which are not allowed to be so; if I travelled around Dumbya’s ‘America’ making them public, I would soon have a one-way ticket to Guatanamo TortureTown as an ‘enemy combatant’ Have a look.
RdB
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/critics-l/attachments/20051213/ac37c5e7/attachment.htm>