This week’s Book Review is on The Bloomsbury Companion to Discourse Analysis, ed. Ken Hyland and Brian Paltridge (New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). 416 pp.
This collection of essays aims to “provide a way into this complex and wide-ranging field [of analyzing discourse] for beginning researchers in the area of applied linguistics” (15). They hope to provide “teachers, students, and researchers with a way of theorizing and investigating both spoken and written discourse.”
The first part of the book contains essays on various methods of discourse analysis. These methods may be executed on written or oral discourses and may stem from various methodological schools of thought. There are essays on narrative analysis, genre analysis, corpus approaches to discourse analysis, and more that are someone less relevant to biblical studies (although see below for a couple that are quite relevant).
The second part of the book focuses on key areas of discourse studies. This includes various areas such as spoken and academic discourse, discourse and gender, discourse and the news, discourse and identity, and more. These essays are less relevant to biblical studies researchers, unless they are engaged in areas such as gender studies, in which case some of these chapters would be fruitful. Each chapter includes a sample study to illustrate the points of the essay, as well as a brief bibliography for further reading.
Since there are far too many essays to summarize and evaluate for their utility, I will mention some of the main essays that would be of interest to those in biblical studies. J. R. Martin discusses systemic functional linguistics, which is a “comprehensive theory of language and social context developed principally in Britain and Australia over the past six decades,” which “draws on Saussure and Hjelmslev in its relational conception [of] language as a stratified system of signs, and follows Firth in treating meaning as function in context” (108). Firth and M. Halliday have been one of the major schools of thought underlying discourse analysis in biblical studies.
Those interested in examining the biblical writings from a sociological perspective would benefit from Ruth Wodak’s essay on Critical Discourse Analysis. This discipline presupposes that the surface level of a discourse must not be taken at face value. It must be challenged through rational thinking in order to explain and change social phenomena. Uncovering social relations, ideologies, structures of power, and other sociological phenomena is the interest of CDA. It has potential for helping understand the situation of power and author, for example, between Paul and his churches, or between Paul and the other apostles (Gal 1-2).
Mike Baynham’s essay on narrative analysis provides three different kinds, the first of which (DA Approaches to Narrative) would be most relevant for biblical studies. He explains the linguistic analysis of the narratival structure proposed by Labov, which includes “Abstract -> Orientation -> Complicating action -> Evaluation -> Result -> Coda.” Unfortunately his sample studies include only oral narratives, told in conversations or in interviews. In fact, many of these essays include information on oral discourse, which might at first seem disappointing to the biblical studies researcher. However, while there are obvious literary qualities to the biblical documents, at the same time they are an extension of natural language-in-use. So what may initially seem inapplicable may actually contain a trove of insights for analyzing written documents, especially if one believes some of the written documents had some sort of oral history behind them.
There are some essays that would be completely inapplicable in biblical studies. For example, Rodney Jones’ essay on data collection (i.e., “entextualization”), which is the process of reifying language as a text by detaching it from its original context, is obviously of no help. Our data field is already entextualized and chosen for us, so we do not have to struggle with the subjective enterprise of choosing our data. The essay on “Ethnography and Discourse Analysis” will be of no help, since we do not deal with the anthropological studies on non-Western societies (93). “Discourse and the News” by Martin Montgomery touches on a topic that has quite specific and unique types of discourse (e.g., news headlines are incredibly elliptical), but the closest we might have to something like a news headline would be the psalms superscriptions, and that is a stretch. There are some more essays that would be less applicable than one would like, but this is not fault of the volume, only of the specific interests of biblical theologians.
Lastly, there are a couple essays that are simply interesting from a vocational perspective. “Academic Discourse” by Ken Hyland discusses the peculiar features of writing in academic circles, the pressures put on academics to publish, the structure of power that their writing erects between professor and student, and the move to English as the international mode of academic discourse. The essay “Classroom Discourse” by Jennifer Hammond would also be helpful for anyone who teaches in a classroom, and perhaps even those who preach. She focuses especially on interaction within the classroom through spoken discourse.
So who would this volume benefit? First, anyone interested in discourse analysis of any kind should purchase this work as a reference. Second, biblical researchers and students would benefit from several of the essays in this volume and would be pointed to further reading, generally seminal studies in that area of research. Lastly, pastors may not find this reading the most interesting, but there is much to be learned about social relations, ways of speaking, and power structures as communicated through language that may not be so evident between pastor and congregant. Understanding how discourse is structured may help in preaching, and understanding power relations may help in speaking and engaging with people in the church and outside of it.
