Teacher Discussion Forums

Book: The Power of Discourse: An Introduction to Discourse Analysis

by Moira Chimombo, Robert L. Roseberry


Quote:

"A text may be of any length whatever. A single token, such a shriek, may constitute a text. At the opposite extreme a lengthy novel, such as Tolstoy's War and Peace, may be said to constitute a single text."

............................

How would you define the words "a text"?

any body of speaking or writing used for the sake of analysis

ssean wrote:any body of speaking or writing used for the sake of analysis

Would a fiction story or a poem fall under that category, in your opinion?

Anything that can be converted to Unicode

Stephen Jones wrote:Anything that can be converted to Unicode

Like a vase of flowers?

The Chinese pictogram for it, yes.

Stephen Jones wrote:The Chinese pictogram for it, yes.

A photo can also be a text, as can a cartoon or something as short as a joke and if you want to move into more complex definitions, in fact so can your vase - anything you can deconstruct can be a text. You don't need words for something to be a text.

When Derrida (father of deconstruction, do a search on him if you want to know more) was asked this question he replied like this:

Mr. Derrida did not seem angry at having to define his philosophy at all; he was even smiling. "Everything is a text; this is a text," he said, waving his arm at the diners around him in the bland suburbanlike restaurant, blithely picking at their lunches, completely unaware that they were being "deconstructed."

Might all sound a little *beep* (and perhaps it is) but the term text has really moved forward in great leaps and bounds over the past 50 years, thanks to Mr Derrida and also computer people use it in very strange ways that I just don't get.

Bet that didn't make anything clearer for you did it!
sorry