A discourse about discourse studies in Germany
The article is an attempt to reconstruct the field of German-language discourse studies and to analyse them critically. Owing to very strong references, in the discourse analysis models examined in the article, to Michel Foucault’s concept, they are regarded as post-Foucault. The authors present the main threads in German-language discourse studies: 1 approaches the objective of which is to formulate a theoretical-methodological basis of a post-Foucault discourse analysis these are primarily “discipline-specific” schools of discourse analysis: linguistic and sociological, as well as the programme of the so-called critical discourse analysis; 2 “dispositive” approaches, which constitute a novelty in the debate over the discourse category and regard the dispositive category as a possibility of finding a supradiscursive “system.” The authors also reflect on the critical remarks about the various threads in the studies, including those formulated by scholars themselves. The main conclusion from the authors’ reconstruction is that there is a tendency in German-language discourse studies to understand the category of discourse quite narrowly, with regard to specific disciplines, and thus that there is a lack of an integrated and interdisciplinary model of discourse analysis.