Syllabus
1. Introductory class
2. A text - key concepts; homework 1
3. Levels of text analysis 1 - operative and cooperative reading; homework 2
4. Levels of text analysis 2 - word, sentence and supra-sentence level; homework 3
5. Narrative analysis 1 - introduction; homework 4
6. Narrative analysis 2 - structural and hermeneutic approaches; homework 5
7. Narrative analysis 3 - interactional and network approaches
8. Discourse analysis 1 - Foucauldian approach
9. Discourse analysis 2 - CDA approach; homework 6
10. Discourse analysis 3 - analysis of conversations (P. Grice); homework 7
11. Discourse analysis 4 - performativity of discourse
12. Software for textual analysis
Annotation
One of the important features of contemporary society is that it produces a large amount of self-descriptions; by the words of Niklas Luhmann, the modern society is an intensively self-observing and self-reporting system. The aim of this course is to provide students with knowledge of relatively broad issues of methods of analysis of these self-descriptions, which are mainly texts in their nature (media texts, biographic narratives, conversations, open-ended questions in questionnaires, expert discourse texts etc.).
The successful student will become fluent in the vocabulary of narrative, discursive, content, and computer-assisted text analyses and bring those tools to bear on various kinds of texts.