Discourse analysis is a popular strand in policy analysis. However, analyzing narratives is something different. Can someone tell me how to articulate the difference eloquently to a well informed public?
As the previous answers have suggested, there are a number of versions of both discourse analysis and narrative analysis. Since you are in political science, it seems like that the forms of discourse analysis you have encountered are most likely to be versions of Critical Discourse Analysis, where the goal is to understand how it is that social issues come to be be discussed in some terms rather than others.
In contrast, most forms of narrative analysis work with the content of individuals' story telling. As Katherine Bischoping says, you could use a discourse approach to analyze narratives, and I assume you could also collect narratives to examine the content of discourse.
Thank you for your question. Narrative is a type of text. Text belongs to language, it is the integrative language unit. Discourse belongs to speech, it is the way of text realization as of language unit within the certain situation in reality. In other words, discourse is a text given with the extra-lingustic factors. So, text is a foot print of the really occurred discourse.
The analysis of discourse has its concept according to the field in which we practice it; in politics it serves its pragmatism; but in the analysis of the narratives we are deliberately looking at the narrator in his novel.
Discourse structure is either argumentative (as in philosophy), descriptive (as in historiography) or narrative (as in novels). However, the three forms of structure often mingle or merge in conversation or in essay writing. In semiotics, the narrative structure of discourse is mostly seen as the overarching one, since narratives can contain description (as in poetry) and argumentation (as in drama).
(Predominantly) argumentative discourse tells you what you must do; descriptive discourse tells you what things are like; and narrative discourse tells you how something happened. No wonder the three forms collaborate in social communication.
From all the comments above is it the case that "discourse' is now a term that applies to every conceivable linguistic performance, and thus has no meaning?
James: That is a very good point. The term comes from the French 'discours' which is highly ambiguous. In the humanities, it is used with an adjective: discours politique, discours religieux, etc. colporting the idea that there are important structures of meaning that determine, specify or qualify the 'flow' of language in a given area, apart from vocabulary. Discours idéologique vs. discours scientifique, and so on. On the other hand, it is also used in linguistics, just to designate transphrastic continuity of meaning in monologue and dialogue. I suspect that the origin is to be found in rhetoric, where genres of discourse (argumentative speech; judiciary, political, celebrative) have been distinguished since Aristotle.
discourse analysis seems comparably more relationist and narrative analysis comparably more essentialist.
Narrative texts have an inner concatenation of events and actions, and then a narrator voice, which delivers narrative discourse, the discourse of the narrative in question. This distinction is of course essential to literary analysis.
Neuroscience provides a clear distinction. Narrativity (physical stories, narratives, recounting events in sequence) has neural substrate in LEFT BA38. Discoursivity (intertextuality [Kristeva, Derrida]; speech acts [Austin, Searle] and meaning-effects [Gadamer; Iser] has neural substrate in RIGHT BA38.
Thank you for your explanation of discourse and narrative in terms of Neuroscience. It is clear that narrative and discourse are different phenomena, which is proved by the functions of LEFT BA38 and RIGHT BA38: narrative as a type of a text and discourse as a certain text realization within actual communicative situation for the pragma-communicative purposes of its creator. In other words, narrative as a certain type of text presuposses its informative component, while the discourse presupposes pragma-communicative component as well. It is lingistic view point .
http://www.fmriconsulting.com/brodmann/BA38.html — Lots of information there. Stories can be told backwards and forwards, with different narrators, and in various emotional 'temperatures', or ironically (Irony resides in Right BA 38). Same story, different 'enunciation', first person or third person narrator etc., and the choice of value on these parameters leads the text into a specific discourse (philosophical, literary, pedagogical, and: modernist/classicist/baroque style).
I would distinguish three main discursive formats: narrative, argumentative, and descriptive. Then, description is embedded in narratives, of course. And argumentation is embedded in the narrator's part of narration. Stories can be arguments in a line of reasoning. When we interpret a story, we argue about its meaning.
I conceptualise discourse analysis as a critique of the socio-political dominant discourse and how it serves the interests of the ruling classes and is reproduced / amplified by the media, sometimes lingering in historical myth, in a post-modernist Foucauldian way. I see narrative analysis as seeing the world through the language and sense-making of individuals, as in the different use of language by the doctor and the patient in Mishler's (1984) study, although of course it can also be a study of life trajectory - the highs and lows of people's stories.
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