{"id":196,"date":"2010-01-23T10:00:59","date_gmt":"2010-01-23T08:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=196"},"modified":"2010-02-25T12:10:25","modified_gmt":"2010-02-25T10:10:25","slug":"discourse-and-silencing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=196","title":{"rendered":"Discourse and silencing"},"content":{"rendered":"
Discourse and silencing.<\/strong> Ed. by Lynn Thiesmeyer<\/strong>. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. x, 316. ISBN 9781588113856<\/a>. $173 (Hb).<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Laura Felton Rosulek<\/strong><\/a>, University<\/em> of Illinois<\/em>, Urbana-Champaign<\/em><\/p>\n

Discourse and silencing <\/em>is one of the very few collections of studies in the field of discourse analysis to use \u2018silencing\u2019, defined as \u2018a way of using language to limit, remove or undermine the legitimacy of another use of language\u2019 (2), as a theoretical term. The book is organized into three major themes: \u2018Gender and the discourses of privacy\u2019, \u2018Law and institutional discourses\u2019, and \u2018National politics and the discourses of exclusion\u2019. Thiesmeyer\u2019s stated objective for the book is not only to discuss the theoretical notions and real-world examples of silencing, but also to demonstrate the commonalities within discourse-analysis studies on silencing despite the interdisciplinary nature of the field.<\/p>\n

In Part 1 on gender has two chapters. Alison Towns<\/strong>, Peter Adams<\/strong>, and Nicola Gavey<\/strong>, in \u2018Silencing talk of men\u2019s violence towards women\u2019, examine interviews of men who have abused their partners to see how they self-silence the discussion of their own violence and convince others to remain silent about it as well. In \u2018Conversational styles and ellipsis in Japanese couples\u2019 conversations\u2019, Shoko Okazaki Yohena<\/strong> analyzes ellipses in the talk of Japanese couples for variations in use and interpretation. She finds that they can be used as a tool for remaining silent about a topic, and that filling in a partner\u2019s ellipses with an unintended meaning can silence the speaker\u2019s message.<\/p>\n

Part 2 begins with Val\u00e9rie Fridland<\/strong>\u2019s \u2018Quiet in the court: Attorneys\u2019 silencing strategies during courtroom cross-examination\u2019. She shows that during the cross-examination of an alleged sexual assault victim, the defense lawyer uses linguistic strategies to silence the witness\u2019s own narration of the events. Patricia E. O\u2019Connor<\/strong>, in \u2018Telling bits: Silencing and the narratives behind prison walls\u2019, discusses how the discourses of and about people in prison are silenced in our society, and how prisoners often self-silence their own experiences of violence within prisons. She then shows that by encouraging autobiographical discourse from inmates, one can break this silence in a potentially therapeutic way.<\/p>\n

In Part 3, \u2018National politics and the discourses of exclusion\u2019, Ruth Wodak<\/strong> (\u2018Discourse of silence: Anti-Semitic discourse in post-war Austria\u2019) shows that while the existence of antisemitism in Austria is denied or ignored, antisemitism does exist in the public discourse, though often in more covert linguistic forms. \u2018Silencing by law: The 1981 Polish \u201cPerformances and Publications Control Act\u201d\u2019, by Dariusz Galasi\u0144ski<\/strong>, discusses how a law in Poland legalized the silencing of topics in public discourse that were contrary to those in power and how the text of the law itself remained silent about its taking away the people\u2019s freedom of speech. Finally, Sandra Lambertus<\/strong>, in \u2018News discourse of Aboriginal resistance in Canada\u2019, finds that, when comparing two newspaper articles on the same event, one silenced the discourse of a dominated group in favor of the discourse of a group in power, but the other included both.<\/p>\n

The concluding article by Adam Jaworski,<\/strong> \u2018Political silencing: A view from Laurie Anderson\u2019s performance art\u2019, shows how a performance artist mentions in her work some of the themes about silence that the previous authors discussed.<\/p>\n

This book examines silencing in a wide range of contexts and from many different perspectives. It is an important resource for scholars interested in how social actors are kept from participating in discourses and how certain topics are kept hidden from public discourses. This book should serve well the field of sociolinguistics, and is a particularly important addition to theoretical studies in discourse analysis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Discourse and silencing. Ed. by Lynn Thiesmeyer. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. x, 316. ISBN 9781588113856. $173 (Hb). Reviewed by Laura Felton Rosulek, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Discourse and silencing is one of the very few collections of studies in the field of discourse analysis to use \u2018silencing\u2019, defined as \u2018a way of using language […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=196"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":199,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196\/revisions\/199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}