Critical Discourse Analysis of Popular Culture

Abstract Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is an approach to discourse analysis that has evolved over the past several decades. It is associated with work conducted since the 1980s by European linguists Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak, and Teun van Dijk and their colleagues but has become quite interdisciplinary as a scholarly practice. CDA also has its North American counterparts with their own interpretations of, and orientations to, critical discourse studies, a broader term, in the work of Gee (2004), for example, as well as scholars in other parts of the world (e.g., Australia, Asia). Traditionally, critical discourse analyses have examined formal media such as newspapers and oral, written, and visual (graphic) political discourse in other venues. However, CDA is also being applied to the analysis of popular culture texts, as illustrated in this entry, but generally by scholars in cultural studies and related fields, rather than in applied linguistics. Most of the work looking critically at popular culture (or “pop” culture, as it is also referred to in the literature) in applied linguistics investigates classroom practices involving, but not centrally concerned with the analysis of, pop culture texts. In what follows, we first provide a brief overview of CDA, followed by a discussion of its application to pop culture.