Theories/Theory of Discourse and Literary Studies I

Abstract

The theories of discourse are a heterogeneous complex of newer theoretical and methodological approaches springing from the meeting point of the social sciences and the humanities at the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies of the previous century, a time of intense methodological turning points, epistemological clarifications, and ideological self-reflections. What they have in common is their interdisciplinary nature, criticism of structuralist conceptions and understanding of language as verbal communication placed into concrete social and historical contexts, criticism of any essentialism, and the deconstruction of traditional metaphysical categories of subject, history, and meaning. The article retains the established distinction between the two main “schools” of discourse theories, the French post-structuralist approach and the Anglo-American discourse analysis focusing on contemporary linguistic approaches, although the main focus is on the first. – Theories of discourse are not easily discernible. It can be established from the analyzed introductions to this discipline, written by Diane Macdonell, Jacob Torfing and Sara Mills, and the collection of essays Diskurstheorien und Literaturwissenschaft, edited by Jürgen Fohrmann and Harro Müller, that there is no consensus on the authors and approaches belonging to this discipline. As far as the correlation between theories of discourse with literature and literary studies is concerned, a precise focus can only be found in the Fohrmann/Müller collection. An overview of the more prominent conceptions of discourse (in linguistics, narratology, Bakhtin and Kristeva, philosophy and Foucault) does also not shed more light on the matter. Setting aside the Anglophonic approaches to discourse analysis focusing on linguistics and the theory of mass media, it would on principle still be possible, due to the overlapping of some key epistemological and theoretical suppositions in the array of theories of discourse introduced to contemporary literary studies, to take numerous disciplines into account: neo- and post-Marxism, colonial and post-colonial studies, new historicism, cultural materialism and cultural studies, feminist theory, various disciplines deriving from post-structuralism, Barthes’ semiotics, psycho-analytical theory and deconstruction, the theory of intertextuality, Foucault’s discourse analysis, and partly also common points within reception aesthetics, the empirical literary science of Siegfried J. Schmidt, Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field and others. However, there is a prevalent approach in literary studies to research these theories separately and to narrow the complex of heterogeneous theoretical and methodological proposals to Foucault’s discourse analysis.