Discourse Analysis Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This example Discourse Analysis Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

Discourse analysis is not a theory but rather a method of inquiry and research that seeks to understand the coherence—and sometimes the contradictions—within the discourse (the spoken or written communications) of individuals, groups, and organizations. Materials that may be subjects of discourse analysis include books, speeches, interviews, conversations, debates, articles, literature, TV programs, and even movies or documentary films. Scholars and sociologists using discourse analysis can focus on quantitative elements (the number of occurrences of certain words) or can try to interpret specific words or constant themes that occur more often than others (or words that the discourse seems to avoid). The study of discourses allows the analyzer to link them to a worldview or to a given ideology. In his book The Archaeology of Knowledge, French philosopher Michel Foucault linked discourses with beliefs and social practices. Apart from sociology and political science, a variety of disciplines, including cultural studies, ethnomethodology, psychology, and social psychology use discourse analysis.

Discourse analysis aims to find meanings and hidden trends. For instance, discourse analysis revealed that Leni Riefenstahl’s famous documentaries Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938) illustrated the Nazi ideology. In France, sociolinguists Louis-Jean Calvet and Jean Véronis have studied the political speeches of French president Nicolas Sarkozy for two years in order to find his main ideas and ideology.

Bibliography:

Calvet, Louis-Jean, and Jean Véronis. Les mots de Nicolas Sarkozy. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2008.
Denzin, Norman, and Yvonna Lincoln, eds. The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, Ca.: Sage, 2005.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock, 1972.
Wooffitt, Robin. Conversation Analysis and Discourse Analysis: A Comparative and Critical Introduction. London: Sage, 2005.