Critical Discourse Analysis and the Rhetoric of Critique

It is not difficult to make claims for the academic success of Critical Discourse Analysis. Chouliaraki and Fairclough begin their new book Discourse in Late Modernity with the statement: ‘Critical discourse analysis ... has established itself internationally over the past twenty years or so as a field of crossdisciplinary teaching and research which has been widely drawn upon in the social sciences and the humanities (for example, in sociology, geography, history and media studies), and has inspired critical language teaching at various levels and in various domains’ (1999, p. 1). One sign of this success has seen the establishment of the term ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’, together with its abbreviation CDA, to denote a distinct and substantial body of work. Much of the success of Critical Discourse Analysis can be traced to the pioneering works of analysts such as Norman Fairclough, Teun van Dijk and Ruth Wodak. If one wished to chart the emergence of the term ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’, one could point to the work of Norman Fairclough. In his 1992 book, Discourse and Social Change, Fairclough did not use the term as such. In this book, Fairclough outlined ‘critical approaches’ to discourse analysis. These critical approaches included ‘critical linguistics’ (Fowler et al., 1979) and Althusserian approaches to the study of ideology. Fairclough was also using other terms such as Critical Language Awareness, which was abbreviated to CLA, and Critical Language Studies or CLS. However, Fairclough (1992b), in his edited book Critical Language Awareness, was using the term ‘critical discourse analysis’ without specially abbreviating it to ‘CDA’. In that work, he positioned ‘critical discourse analysis’ as a form of CLS. Three years later, a decisive terminological shift was made when Fairclough published his book Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1995). The book bore the subtitle The critical study of language. The use of the definite article in the subtitle was emblematic: it was as if the multiplicity of ‘critical approaches’, which were outlined in Fairclough (1992a), had coalesced into a uniformity which could be identified as the critical study. This change in nomenclature is not mentioned merely for historical purposes, but in order to raise questions about the success of Critical Discourse