Dialogisk diskursanalyse

Litteraturvitenskapelig metode og skolepraksis

Abstract

A Dialogical Discourse Analysis

The article discusses the increasing gap between literary analysis as scientific practice and as part of the mother tongue education in school, and suggests a dialogical framework as a way of bridging this gap serving the interests of both sides. The university subject is dependent on its relevance for the school context in order to be considered useful in a time of ideological change. The school subject is being thoroughly reformed in line with international conceptions of skill and key competencies that the individual needs in order to achieve full citizenship. In Norway the status of literary art in school is challenged by a rhetoric of the real in curriculum and educational discourse. The article addresses this challenge in an attempt to rethink the functions of literary art in school without reference to traditional arguments like aesthetic experience or national cultural identity. Bakhtins dialogism is the basis for suggesting dialogical discourse analysis as a method for literary analysis in scientific as well as in school contexts. This method calls for a consistent focus on relations between discursive positions in general and questions concerning utterances and dialogizing background in particular. Working with literature with a focus on relations between voices in the text is a way of promoting consciousness of how humans relates to each other as language users, how an utterance acquires its meaning against a dialogizing background, and how we all continuously are involved in discourses that shape what is possible to say and how it will be understood.