Introduction

Abstract

In this book I shall present a cultural approach to discourse. That is, I shall treat discourse as neither objectively given nor universally organized. Instead, I shall argue for a notion of discourse as culturally saturated forms of verbal communication, or, in other words, as a set of diversified and competing constructions of meaning associated with particular groups of people. Further, I shall suggest ways in which discourse research can be rendered to achieve a particular kind of cultural politics. The cultural politics here consists specifically in facilitating cultural cohesion and common progress by deconstructing discourses of cultural repression on the one hand and promoting new discourses of cultural solidarity and prosperity on the other. To show the range of research tasks that the present approach can be applied to, moreover, I shall provide a number of empirical, practical studies dealing with pressing cultural issues.