Text Context Pretext Book

This is a beautifully written and published book about the foundations of discourse analysis as the study of what texts are taken to mean. Widdowson provides a broad critical history of discourse analysis, arguing that the interpretation of texts involves consideration of not only the words themselves but also their context and the 'pretext' or purpose with which readers approach them. This leads on to a thorough examination of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), a movement within linguistics that students tend to find attractive, because it purports to lay bare hidden biases and prejudices in texts. Finally, linguistics seems to them to have some social value. However, Widdowson, although sympathetic to CDA's own pretexts, uses his elegant prose to deny that CDA has any pretensions to scholarly respectability, dismissing it as no more scientific than rivalling 'readings' of literary works. At times, the author's irony descends into acid sarcasm, but generally I can only praise such a sustained and thoughtful argument.