Catalog Search
 
Advanced Search

My shopping cart cart icon
Your cart is empty
My wish list wishlist icon
Your wish list is empty



Last update:
9 February 2010

© John Benjamins
Home

Blurb Table of contents Quotes Subjects

Discourse and Silencing

Representation and the language of displacement

Cover image
Edited by Lynn Thiesmeyer
Keio University

Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 5

2003. x, 316 pp.
Publishing status: Available

Hardbound – In stock
978 90 272 2695 2 / EUR 115.00
978 1 58811 385 6 / USD 173.00
Add to shopping cart

e-Book – Available from e-book platforms
978 90 272 9632 0 / EUR 115.00 / USD 173.00
Ordering information

Add to wish list

Silencing is not only a physically coercive act. It is also an act of language involving forms of selection, representation and compliance. Discourse and Silencing weaves together theories and examples of discourse from different disciplines in order to put forward a theory of silencing in language: that discursive systems filter, represent and displace types of knowledge into other forms of expression.
Each chapter of the book analyses examples of silencing through discourse in various social and political fields. The examples cover courtroom trials, government censorship, domestic violence, marital conversations, penal institutions, news media, and political rhetoric. They cover societies ranging from Eastern and Central Europe, Canada and the U.S. to New Zealand and Japan. The contributors clarify the difference between chosen silences and the silencing that, as a practice, seeks to limit, alter or de-legitimise another’s discourse. The book also examines the continuous resistances and shifts in discourse and silencing within the social and political frameworks in which interlocutors negotiate their relations to each other.

Table of contents

Acknowledgements
ix
1. Introduction: Silencing in discourse
Lynn Thiesmeyer
1–33
I. Gender and the discourses of privacy
Introduction
Lynn Thiesmeyer
37–41
2. Silencing talk of men’s violence towards women
Alison Towns, Peter Adams and Nicola Gavey
43–77
3. Conversational styles and ellipsis in Japanese couples’ conversations
Shoko Okazaki Yohena
79–110
II. Law and institutional discourses
Introduction
Lynn Thiesmeyer
113–118
4. Quiet in the court: Attorneys’ silencing strategies during courtroom cross-examination
Valérie Fridland
119–138
5. Telling bits: Silencing and the narratives behind prison walls
Patricia E. O'Connor
139–169
III. National politics and the discourses of exclusion
Introduction
Lynn Thiesmeyer
173–177
6. Discourses of silence: Anti-Semitic discourse in post-war Austria
Ruth Wodak
179–209
7. Silencing by law: The 1981 Polish ‘performances and publications control act’
Dariusz Galasiński
211–232
8. News discourse of Aboriginal resistance in Canada
Sandra Lambertus
233–272
IV. Coda: Performance discourse and meta-commentaries on silencing
Introduction
Lynn Thiesmeyer
275–278
9. Political silencing: A view from Laurie Anderson’s performance art
Adam Jaworski
279–296
Notes on contributors
297–298
Name index
299–303
Subject index
305–315

“What is truly distinctive about this volume is Thiesmeyer's ability to weave together a variety of studies of silencing into a coherent theory and illustration of the study of silencing as a discursive means of legitimizing some forms of language over others. [...] Through all of these studies, the theme of silencing as a powerful, though often invisible, tool to shape personal, legal, social, political and national discourses becomes apparent. [...] This edited volume is a well-written, well-argued, and compelling read.”
Lisa M. Coutu, University of Washington, in the Journal of Sociolinguistics, Vol. 8:4 (2004)

Subject classification

Linguistics
Discourse studies
Pragmatics
Sociolinguistics and Dialectology