Teun A. Van Dijk's Concept of 'Racism and the Press'

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, University of Hannover, language: English, abstract: This paper is designed to examine Teun A. Van Dijk's concept of Critical Discourse Analysis in view of racism in the Press. At first it is important to shortly introduce the concept of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) that has been created and discussed by Fowler, Van Dijk and Fairclough. Additionally, one has to define the special kind of racism that is conveyed in the newspapers, and how it succeeds in being almost imperceptible for the reader. Here, one also has to take into consideration in what way racism becomes pivotal concerning society and societal structures. The analysis, that adheres to Van Dijk's concept, which he introduces and explains in 'Racism and the Press', will focus on six main analytical aspects, concerning the newspapers' headlines, the local semantic structures and semantic strategies, style and rhetoric, subjects and topics, as well as an analysis of quotations patterns. Additionally, it will be explained, how and with which means the Press succeeds in influencing their readers. All examples, which are used in this paper, are taken from van Dijk's analysis. The possibility of a new investigation would have been attractive and interesting but would definitely go beyond the scope of this paper. By examining and presenting Van Dijk's concept of analysing and interpreting newspaper articles in order to find constructions of racism, it will in the end make possible to assess the necessity and usefulness of his concept.