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Recent developments in the field of CDA at the University of Vienna have proved timely for my own research. The discourse-historical approach to CDA was initially developed by Wodak et al (1990) in order to discuss anti-Semitism in Austria during the 1986 election campaign of Kurt Waldheim. Whilst there has been research on historical topics such as questions of identity and political discourses in various countries (eg, Billig, 1995; Wodak et al, 1999; Wodak and Van Dijk 2000), there was a general neglect of detailed grammatical research on narratives about the past which Martin and Wodak (2003) sought to remedy in a recent edited collection. This collection sought to ‘deconstruct the re/packaging and re/evaluation of

[historical] events from both functional linguistic and critic perspectives’ (2003: 2), drawing on a range of texts such as political speeches, television talk shows,

newspapers, and the bureaucracy that surrounds official and state planning processes. The multimodal and multidisciplinary nature of this approach to CDA has proved useful in the analysis of my own data which is drawn from a large variety of sources, the greatest part of which comes from the case files held in the National Archives, and includes the multimodal nature of the widows’ letters as well as more public documents such as wartime recruitment posters.

For example, a recruitment poster from 1915 carries the text ‘Women of Britain say “Go!”’7

. The intertextuality of the text offers a direct attribution of the directive ‘go!’ to the female population of Britain, thus putting women in the active role of ordering (implicitly) men to volunteer for armed service. In this way, there is a direct gender division between the unanimous voice of the ‘women of Britain’ and the unnamed object of the directive: the opposite masculine polarity. Interestingly, oral histories reveal posters such as this also positioning women to assume a more active role. In a recent collection of oral histories, (van Emden and Humphries, 2003: 118), one interviewee reports that she was inspired by this particular poster to become a VAD nurse. She read the underlying message that by encouraging the men to go off and fight, by implication women were saying that they were willing and able to look after the country whilst the men were away. The picture on this poster shows what appear to be three generations, comprising two women and a young boy who are firmly placed within the domestic sphere, their intertwined arms and upturned faces indicating a vulnerability which emphasises their need to be protected, implicitly by men. The heroism of the women remaining is highlighted by the youngest figure on the poster, the male child, who is towered over by the two women. In this discourse of morality based on virtuous females,

It is the men who are seen as giving their lives so that the community is protected – and women who are seen both as being protected and obliged to await the return of men, whether as memory or as homecoming hero. Needless to say, the waiting women are assumed to be waiting in a state of virtue, otherwise the sacrifice will be sullied and de-sacralised.

(J. Davies in Clark, 1993: 121)

But this is not the only discourse in action in this poster. There is a very strong sense of national identity which links the text (it is women of Britain) with the image of England’s mythical rolling green hills. The text of the patriotic hymn ‘Jerusalem’ is much-quoted for the phrase ‘England’s green and pleasant land’, and is one of the most commonly evoked images in relation to a particularly English national identity. Interestingly, the setting of part of Blake’s exploration of the sublime (see de Luca, 1995) in his poem ‘Milton’ to Parry’s score was originally prepared for use by the suffragette movement in the early 20th

century, where its aspirational and uplifting message is read as the female quest to build a ‘New

Jerusalem’ (Hartman, 2003). The use of this hymn by the suffragette movement was quickly extended to encompass the whole nation, both genders, and the dominant patriotic discourses of the time, where it has remained ever since.

Therefore we could say that this recruitment poster is interdiscursive in that it is drawing on two different discourses – morality and national identity – as well as intertextually drawing on other texts such as popular songs to support and endorse its message. The readings of it in different contexts, such as that of van Emden and Humphries’ interviewee, show how different social conditions can lead to different processes of interpretation. The representation of the virtuous female who is

indebted to the valorous servicemen came to be evoked through discourses of social welfare, in addition to the morality and national identity that are shown here. Indeed, the very public nature of these recruitment posters is linked to the public’s ownership of war widows, and the women’s assured claim that the country is

indebted to them, is a feature of the data that forms the basis of this thesis, as will be explored through the triangulatory approach to discourse analysis Wodak has

Because of its concern with variables such as ideology, power, hierarchy and gender, CDA has been used to inform studies relating to gender, racism, media discourses, political discourses, and identity. The greatly differing analytical techniques employed in various CDA studies, as well as the disputed definitions of such key terms as discourse, critical, ideology and power, has meant that CDA is not viewed as a holistic or closed paradigm. Wodak and Martin (2003: 5) stress that CDA should be thought of ‘as a “school”, or a programme, which many researchers find useful and to which they can relate in terms of their research goals’. CDA does not constitute a well-defined empirical method but rather a cluster of approaches with a similar theoretical base and similar research questions: there is no typical CDA way of collecting data. Indeed, many studies don’t even mention method of data collection.

Wodak (2002: 64) argues convincingly that CDA ‘must be multitheoretical and multimethodological, critical and self-reflective’. Advocating a pragmatic approach to CDA which would go a long way towards countering the arguments of critics of CDA such as Stubbs and Widdowson (above), she states that such an approach ‘would not seek to provide a catalogue of context-less propositions and generalisations, but rather to relate questions of theory formation and

conceptualisation closely to the specific problems that are to be investigated’ (ibid). In other words, seeking to move away from problem-orientated science, this

approach tries to find the most useful linguistic research strategies to explore the texts and contexts in question. As discussed above, the Foucaultian notion of ‘power’ in CDA is based around the view that texts are often the sites of struggles in that they show traces of differing discourses and ideologies contending and

struggling for dominance. Wodak stresses the view that it is not only the realisation of power through grammatical forms within a text, but also by an individual’s access to and control of a social occasion by means of the genre of a text. In this way, she argues for the importance of genre as it is ‘often exactly within the genres associated with given social occasions that power is exercised or challenged’ (2002: 11), an argument that builds on Fairclough’s stress as to the importance of intertextuality.

Again drawing on the work of Foucault, the notion of ‘power’ in CDA for both Fairclough and Wodak is based around the view that texts are often the sites of struggles in that they show traces of differing discourses and ideologies contending and struggling for dominance. In common with other CDA theorists, Wodak and Martin (2002: 6) emphasise that discursive differences in texts are negotiated, ‘governed by differences in power which is in part encoded in and determined by discourse and genre’. They go on to point out that, in relation to the recording and retelling of histories, ‘[p]ower comes visibly into play as soon as the various narratives of the past are confronted with each other and elites select one of the competing narratives and naturalise it as the “past” (what “really” happened)’ (2003: 8). The histories offered by widows of First World War soldiers are particularly relevant in this respect, as they are the personal accounts which were disallowed by official agents of the State, and later by historians of the period.

Countering the criticisms of CDA by Stubbs, Widdowson and others, Wodak proposes a method of CDA that is based on the principle of triangulation, using a variety of empirical data and it is this that makes the historical-discourse approach more effective (2002: 65). Wodak’s triangulatory approach seeks to explore the connections between discursive practices and extra-linguistic social structures. This approach combines various interdisciplinary, methodological and source-specific analytical approaches. The texts I have selected for this study vary in terms of discourse, genre and topic, as well as chronologically. Wodak’s own studies are smaller scale, but the basic model holds together in my own research. However, my use of the historical-discourse approach will differ from Wodak’s model in that she chose to focus extensively on genre. Whilst this was suitable to the data she was analysing in her corpus, I am very aware that this emphasis would be detrimental to my own aim of giving a ‘voice’ to the individual widows that form the basis of my study. In addition, the main part of my data comes from the letters exchanged between the widows and the Ministry of Pensions, limiting the range of genres that are relevant, contrasting with the larger variety of genres that formed Wodak’s studies. This is not to say that genre is irrelevant to my study, but that the emphasis is more appropriately focused on intertextual references that will reveal more of the

voices that reside with the texts here for study as well as the contrast between public and private spheres that will be apparent.

The triangulatory approach that is used within Wodak’s model of discourse historical analysis includes the exploration of different discursive strategies. This section will discuss briefly the discursive strategies that are most relevant to the subsequent analysis of my own data, as detailed above. It is important to point out at this stage that not all of the strategies are employed in all of the texts that form the corpus under analysis, but what follows is a discussion of the most relevant strategies that are utilised.