<p>The aim of this study is to describe how reviews of literature in Bonniers litterära magasin and Expressen changed during the period 1964-2004. The investigation is based on 20 reviews of novels and short stories, which are analysed with a method described in Hellspong and Ledin (1997) and inspired by Halliday. The theoretical frame of the investigation is founded on critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1992 & 2001) and Habermas´social theory of the public sphere.</p><p>The investigation shows, among other things, that the reviews became shorter and easier to read in both paper during the period. The investigation also shows that the genre´s style, composition and contents are relatively stable, and that current ideologies in society have a tendency to be reflected in the reviewers´evaluation of the books. To generalize, the reviews thus developed from a poetic genre in 1964, to become political in the 1970s, academic in the 1980s, feminist in the 1990s and finally an intermedial genre in 2004.</p>

Travel narratives of the nineteenth century frequently became vehicles for colonialist discourse, strategically representing the Other(s) in order to justify their subjugation, and their land as a site of opportunity. W.W.H. Davis's travel narrative, El Gringo: New Mexico and Her People (1857) was no exception. This dissertation begins by arguing that we need to read El Gringo as a rhetorical text, that Davis's objective in portraying both the land and the people was to represent New Mexico as inherently "disponible," a term used by Mary Louise Pratt to indicate "available for capitalist improvement." Working from this assertion, I use the methodology of the Discourse-Historical Approach developed by Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak to explore the development of racialized constructions of New Mexican identity, their ideological relationship to "disponibility," and how these constructs have been reproduced intertextually through discourse. As accepted beliefs concerning the state, they continue to be recontextualized in new situations, notably to justify the disproportionate location of nuclear weapons-related industries, waste, and research activities within the state. Just as Davis and other earlier writers had used words such as "barren," "isolated," "unpopulated," and "wasteland," to rationalize the US presence, US government officials used these very terms a century later to argue that New Mexico was the location-of-choice for building and testing the first nuclear weapon. I argue that a direct discursive connection exists between the US colonization of New Mexico in 1846 and its nuclear colonization in 1942. As part of the ongoing legacy of colonialism, the language used to justify New Mexico's nuclear burden has marginalized the state's original inhabitants, diminishing their land rights and creating situations of environmental racism, such as the Church Rock incident on the Navajo Reservation. In some cases, Native Americans and Nuevomexicanos were "disappeared" from the discourse entirely, as with several Pueblo communities living adjacent to the site of the Manhattan Project. Dialectically, the nuclear colonization of New Mexico has transformed Manifest Destiny as well, reconfiguring its initial purpose to ensure US hegemony internally, to the ability of the US to maintain nuclear hegemony worldwide.

In this dissertation, the denaturalization of migrants in the US and Italy as represented in newspaper crime reports was identified and compared to the opposing naturalization of Italian crime organizations in Italy and Wall Street/ corporate criminals in the US. This was accomplished through careful, multidisciplinary, scientific analysis of over 100 articles taken from Italian and US newspapers of assorted political tendencies from the years 2004-2010. Quantitative and qualitative methods were combined beginning with a corpus analysis of texts from each group studied followed by a topic analysis designed to identify topics discussed in the media for each group analyzed. In addition, lexical choices were categorized as denaturalization, naturalization or derogation, and examples from texts were examined in depth to reveal linguistic (such as metaphor) strategies involved in negative or positive representation of these groups. A Critical Discourse Analysis Approach combined with Social Semiotics and grounded in Social Identity and Nationalism theories was employed to reveal an underlying racist and xenophobic ideology in both Italian and US media. Results show that in both the United States and Italy, the highlighting of migrants' lack of proficiency in the host country language as well as cultural practices functions as evidence of how migrants are different thus justifying discriminatory practices against them. The resulting categorization of migrants as "Them" serves the dominant group's purpose of staying in power. In conclusion, the author points to a need for teacher educators in the field of second language education and literacy to make it a top priority to educate teachers and students as to how discourse contains underlying ideologies and how to think critically to de-construct and de-mystify them.

Learners from many corners of the earth are acquiring English as a Foreign Language (EFL), lending importance to issues of language learning and its effects on global and local identities being forged in the process. As English language users, they are recipients and producers of multiple discourses around the global status of English as a foreign language, from English as linguistic, material, and symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1991) to language as commodity (Heller, 1999). Such discourses are accompanied by representations of language and culture, or imagined communities (Anderson, 1983, Norton, 2001) that represent language use and cultural representations deemed as legitimate.The purpose of this study is to triangulate three different but intersecting perspectives: that of the researcher, Mexican EFL teachers and Mexican teachers-in-training, on the imagined communities and the underlying ideological discourses of English in a global EFL textbook, as well as those held by these same teachers and teachers-in-training. Critical discourse analysis, classroom observations, in-depth interviews and language learning autobiographies provided the data for a critical assessment of the language and cultural content of the textbook and the ideologies of English.While CDA has been rightly challenged for privileging the researcher's position, this study contributes to a poststructuralist view of the participants as agents of change; they are receptors of discourses that taint their ideologies about language, but they also resist and transform them, through articulated ideas as well as through specific classroom actions that allow them to appropriate the English language, despite the textbook's systematic exclusion of speakers like them, and cultural practices like theirs.This study contributes to the growing field of critical applied linguistics, where learners are viewed as social beings in sites of struggle and with multiple and changing identities (Norton, 2000). In this vein, neutrality can no longer be accepted as a construct in textbooks or in the ELT practice, since the contained practices are subject to ideologies which must be dismantled in order to offer students and teachers more equitable representations of the English language and its speakers.

Following the demise of apartheid, legislative, political and social practices were dramatically changed to promote equality and shared access for all South Africans. Newspapers and other mass media texts give insight to the co-construction of ethnic identity post-apartheid and evidence the emergence of a new dominant cultural narrative. In this new dominant cultural narrative, the trope of a colorblind national identity is frequently referenced. Another key component in this narrative construction is the memorialization of past traumatic events. This dissertation examines the news coverage of the 30th anniversary of the Soweto Uprisings, which occurred on June 16, 2006. The Soweto Uprisings will be framed as a "cultural trauma" (Alexander et al., 2004) and methods of critical discourse analysis will be used to examine the public construction of national identity in the post-apartheid era.The following questions guide the analysis of news media discourse: What changes to the South African national identity are evidenced in news stories covering the anniversary of the Soweto Uprisings? Do racially distinctive communities participate equally in the creation of this media discourse? In what ways are South African ethnic minorities "othered" in news features? How did/does the dominant cultural narrative evidenced in the media discourse influence the construction and management of racial identities in the larger context of South African society? The examination of the co-construction of national and racial identities in these news features draws upon an amalgamation of CDA methodologies outlined in Fairclough (1995, 1999), van Dijk (1988, 1991), and Wodak (Wodak & Weiss, Eds., 2003). The creation and re-creation of a shared history from the collective trauma of forcefully imposed, restrictive racialized communities is a dimension of national identity construction saliently evidenced by changes in the public discourse or dominant/counter narratives. Media discourse illustrates the emergence of colorblind national identity as the desirable, or default, national identity in post-apartheid South Africa and highlights the journalistic role in the creation and management of racial and national identities, liberation narratives, and reconciliatory discourses.

Since the events of September 11, 2001, the threat of terrorism has gained ever more political salience, occupying a place at the top of the EU political agenda. In response to the perceived threat, the EU has developed a distinct approach to counter-terrorism, themed around what is called the "fight against terrorism‟. This approach is more than just a set of institutional or public policy responses designed to negate the threat of terrorism; it is also an influential political discourse which plays an important role in the construction of counter-terrorism policy and the legitimisation of counter-terrorism policy responses. This thesis uses critical discourse analysis to study the discursive construction of EU counter-terrorism policy. It uses representative extracts from twenty counter-terrorism documents prepared by/or for the EU institution the European Council, across a ten-year period from November 1999 to December 2009. The analysis identifies several strands of the "fight against terrorism‟ discourse, which it is argued are central to its constitution and that remain consistent across the period analysed. In the post-September 11 period, these strands of the counter-terrorism discourse play an important role in constructing an ubiquitous internal/external "terrorist‟ threat. These include: terrorism as a "criminal act‟; terrorism as an act perpetrated primarily by "non-state actors‟; terrorism as "new‟ and seeking to gain access to and/or use weapons of mass destruction; the threat of terrorism linked to an "open‟ or "globalised‟ geo-strategic environment, thus requiring measures of "control‟ at the EU border; and the threat of terrorism linked to "violent radicalisation‟ or "Islamist terrorism‟, emanating both internally ("home-grown terrorism‟) and externally to the EU. When these different strands are taken together they constitute the "fight against terrorism‟ discourse. It is argued that this discourse helps to construct the identity of the EU, whilst simultaneously the identity of the EU is central to the formulation of counter-terrorism policies. As such, the representations contained within the counter-terrorism discourse and counter-terrorism policy are considered to be mutually or co-constitutive. The main contention of the thesis therefore is that EU identity is constituted through the "fight against terrorism‟ discourse. Critical discourse analysis was chosen as a method through which to investigate EU counter-terrorism policy because it allows us to: map how the "fight against terrorism‟ discourse is constructed; to demonstrate how it provides a language for talking about terrorism; to understand how the discourse defines what is accepted knowledge about (who or what is) terrorism; and to reveal how that knowledge structures the counter-terrorism policy response as a "natural‟ or "common-sense‟ approach to the challenge of terrorism. This approach is novel in the sense that it is attentive to often neglected issues such as identity. In particular, it explores how the "fight against terrorism‟ discourse construct a "European‟ sense of Self in opposition to a "terrorist‟ Other. It investigates the extent to which the "fight against terrorism‟ discourse plays a role in the legitimisation of new security practices; as well as reflecting on the extent to which these practices are contributing to the blurring of the distinction between internal and external security policy. It also considers whether the discourse is reflective of a process of "securitisation‟ of social and political life within Europe.

This thesis argues that website translations can be taken as a form of social control striving to achieve certain political or economic ends by the website owners from a self-representation perspective. Studying the Chinese-to-English translations of the destination sections in four tourism websites, this study aims to derive interpretations as to how the act of translating formulates multiple self-representations, which may be seen as ideological attempts to influence the perceptions of target-text audiences. This thesis has two main parts. The first, Chapters 1 and 2, outlines the research objectives, background information and the conceptualisation of the four cases, and a two-stage comparative method working within an integrated theoretical framework. The second part, Chapters 3 to 5, comprises the empirical findings, discussing how features of discourses hypothetically prominent in a particular dimension of the website context may come to manifest different identities of the website owners. The translation strategies for these features are examined to identify the aspects of these identities changed in the self-representation contexts. Chapter 3 hypothesizes that the common context of the websites is dominated by tourism discourse and other associated discourses. The translation strategies for discourse features expressing a set of shared identities of the website owners suggest that the concepts of consumerism and commodity advertising are re-formulated in the translations. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss further identities of the owners manifested in the diverging sub-contexts of the websites, and underline aspects of these identities foregrounded in the translations. Chapter 4 highlights the diverging organisational identities of the official and corporate websites. The translation strategies for certain organisational features show that different organisational stances, different beneficiaries and different business rivals of the two categories of websites are emphasised in the translations. Studying the identity of being ‘Chinese people’ formulated by certain re-presented features of local discourse, Chapter 5 points to the differences between the national images re-presented by the China websites and the regional images foregrounded by the HK websites in their translations. Finally, the conclusions summarize various notions relating to the multiple identities re-formulated in the self-representation context, as well as their economic and political implications.

This thesis explores the degree of independent action possible by national governments in deciding their education policies – in other words, what may be termed their sphere of authority (SoA) – in the context of globalisation; whereby Pakistan, perhaps more than many nation states, is subject to a variety of geopolitical and economic pressures. This issue is explored through a study of the recent education policy review process in Pakistan that resulted in a White Paper: ‘Education in Pakistan’ in 2007. In exploring the SoA of the government of Pakistan in deciding its education policy priorities, key areas of enquiry include the tensions between national and global interests and their attempted discursive management by the government of Pakistan. The research uses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as its main methodological resource and looks at two kinds of textual data: interviews with key policy actors and selected policy texts. The methodology of CDA draws attention to the fact that texts are embedded within linguistic, discursive and structural contexts, and that these contexts provide resources that are mobilized by different actors. The textual data resources were analysed to see how language shapes the construction of the White Paper; what discourses are being drawn upon and contested in the articulation of the White Paper and thus what broad power structures shape the White Paper and illustrate the SoA of the government of Pakistan. The findings suggest that the policy review process as illustrated by the White Paper reveals various tensions caused by differences between global and national education policy interests. These tensions are visible in the style and genre of policy; the pursuit of global policy prescriptions; trends to privatization of provision; and disputes over the issue of language and about the ideological principles that should inform educational provision. The research suggests that inclusive and ‘soft’ governance discourse along with a process of consultation were used by the government in an attempt to manage these tensions. The expertise with which the government designed the consultation process and deployed discursive resources sought to establish and maintain its SoA.

Recent developments in translation studies since the 1990s have focused on the ideological implications of translation, seeing the role of the translator as an interventionist and a mediator. This new paradigm overcomes the idea that translation is a mimetic task that consists merely of transferring meaning from one language to another, but rather it is associated with political processes which may involve domination, oppression, submission or resistance amongst social groups and communities. Recognition is given to the capacity of translation to forge social and cultural change. Postcolonial contexts have proven to be particularly fertile for the study of ideological issues related to translation insofar as they reflect a situation of inequality between language communities. In these contexts, translation can be used as a political artefact either to perpetuate colonial domination or to fight against it. As a result, the 1990s have seen the emergence of postcolonial translation theories. These new theories are not only applicable to contexts that are most commonly identified as postcolonial, but to any type of situation where there exists inequality between the two systems in which translation takes place (e.g., in subaltern cultures where the practice of translation can become a means of resistance against a situation of cultural domination and a channel of self-definition). In this regard, the situation of Galicia in the 1920s and 1930s is paradigmatic and it offers invaluable grounds for the study of translation when used as an ideological instrument in the struggle for the search and construction of a national identity. During this period a group of intellectuals, widely known as Xeración Nós, emerged in the region concerned with the articulation of a nationalist discourse based on the cultural and political differentiation of Galicia with regard to the rest of Spain. Their nation-building project was a response to a situation of cultural oppression, long imposed by the Spanish state represented by Castile, and it was based on the concepts of Celticism and Atlanticism. Resorting back to the alleged Galician ancestors, the Celts, they strove to establish affinities with the other so-called Celtic nations of Northern Europe, particularly Ireland, in order to include Galicia within the Celtic mythological tradition and, by extension, within a new Atlantic civilisation opposed to the Mediterranean one which they associated with Spain. Within this well planned ideological agenda, translation of Irish literary texts played an essential role as it was used as a political tool to establish the abovementioned affinity with Ireland. From the selection of the texts to be translated to the actual discourse strategies used by the translators, translation became a process of appropriation and manipulation to support ideological ends. Focusing on the translations of the Irish poet and playwright W.B. Yeats, the most translated Irish writer of the period and profoundly admired by the Galician intelligentsia, this thesis intends to explore how translation was used in a subversive and manipulative way to show Galicia’s distinctiveness and to build a national identity resisting cultural domination. Therefore, I will demonstrate the capacity of translation to shape cultures and to aid and support cultural and social change.

The purpose of this study is to explore the assumption that classrooms are the most appropriate places for the Teaching of English as a Second or Other Language (TESOL) to adult learners in contemporary global society. It considers the success of postmodern general education curricula that systematically dissolve the boundaries between the classroom and the community and seeks to show why such a place-based approach might be particularly useful in transforming TESOL curricula which for the most part overlook informal learning. This study offers 15 successful non-mother tongue English users the opportunity to reflect on their language learning in two separate open-ended interviews. Subsequently, it analyses the range and properties of the places of their acquisition as they emerge from the interview data. The study finds that the classroom is an insufficient place because its social relations necessarily limit learner agency and generally render it ineffective for ESOL acquisition. This suggests the need to transform TESOL into a practice from within which quite new places of learning with more equal social relations emerge where English language can be effectively acquired. This study recommends that English language learners and teachers collaboratively negotiate opportunities for participation in real-world English speaking communities of practice in order to acquire language rapidly and thoroughly. It suggests that this might be achieved by transforming tertiary level English classrooms into laboratories for critical reflection where students are encouraged to discuss problems of significance to them and subsequently deliver real world solutions to the local community. This exploration of place-based TESOL employs Critical Discourse Analysis as its methodology and is situated within the critical paradigm of language education research.