Introduction

[Georgina Heydon]

> From: Pegeen Reichert Powell <reichepm at miavx1.acs.muohio.edu>
...
> Genre theory has been important to me as a link between rhetoric and
> sociolinguistics.  But lately I have been especially excited about
critical
> discourse analysis, particularly as theorized by Norman Fairclough, and
the
> possiblilites CDA holds for a politically charged pedagogy.
...

I'm into cda too - I expect you've read Ruth Wodak's  book (1996)
'Disorders of Discourse'?  She makes the point that even if changes to
discursive practices (eg. in insitutional discourse) are made through the
application of cda, these changes may only further obfuscate the
asymmetrical power structure of the discourse, and not open it (the
discourse) to the lay community, as was intended.

Georgina Heydon
Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
University of Melbourne
Parkville   Victoria    3052
Australia

Ph: 61 3 9344 5488

email: g.heydon at linguistics.unimelb.edu.au