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Critique and Analysis in Media Studies: Media Criticism as Practical ActionUNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT Practitioners in media studies have generated varying styles of research: critiques, analyses, polemics, etc., each of which is a different form of discourse. In the course of evaluating such research, sometimes what passes for analysis is really a polemic and what is genuinely an analysis is criticized for being a polemic. Analysis should explicate possible meanings which inhere in texts, not instruct us as to which meaning(s) should be taken up. If certain critical formulations become part of this explication, they need not be seen as a departure from analysis. Such a `critical edge' is itself a part of the achievement of the analysis and does not make the analyst `complicit' with one or another particular version of the text being analyzed. The paper proposes an analytical strategy to guide the analysis through the `matrix of criticality'. The debate over what is to count as analysis and what may be deemed a polemic can be settled when analysis can elucidate a particular position (P) on a topic, with respect to particular background (B) commitments, through the explication of the actual text (T). A case study on the topic of the Lebanon War, 1982, is offered to illustrate these structural components of analysis.
Key Words: criticality • discourse analysis • ethnomethodology • media studies • textual analysis
Discourse & Society, Vol. 6, No. 1,
7-26 (1995) This article has been cited by other articles:
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