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Last update:
9 February 2010

© John Benjamins
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Re/reading the past

Critical and functional perspectives on time and value

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Edited by J.R. Martin and Ruth Wodak
University of Sydney / University of Vienna

2003. vi, 277 pp.
Publishing status: Available

HardboundIn stock
978 90 272 2698 3 / EUR 110.00
978 1 58811 431 0 / USD 165.00
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e-BookAvailable from e-book platforms
978 90 272 9602 3 / EUR 110.00 / USD 165.00
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Re/reading the Past is concerned with the discourses of history, from the complementary perspectives of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The papers in the book stress the discursive construction of the past, focussing on the different social narratives which compete for official acknowledgement. Issues of collective and cultural memory are addressed, reflecting the "linguistic turn" in the Social Sciences. The book covers a range of discourses, interpreting texts from popular culture to academic discourse including the construction and evaluation of past events in a variety of places around the world. It is especially timely in its focus on the construction of time and value in a post-colonial world where history discourses are central to on-going processes of reconciliation, debates on war crimes, and the issues of amnesty and restitution. As such the book fills a significant gap in interdisciplinary debates as well as in register and genre analysis, and will be of general interest to historians, political scientists and discourse analysts as well as students and teachers of ESP (English for Specific Purposes) and EAP (English for Academic Purposes).


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This volume provides multiple models of approaching historical discourse from a critical perspective, enabling the comparison and evaluation of different approaches to data and frameworks for analysis, as well as encouraging dialogue between CDA and SFL. it is a valuable resource for understanding how texts and contexts interact in the construction of evaluation and interpretation in history.
Mary J. Schleppegrell, University of California, Davis, USA, in Discourse Studies Vol. 7:3 (2005)