The Discursive Construction of Austrian National Identity - page 2
Keywords: German; Austrian; Linguistics; Sociolinguistics; discourse; identity; analysis
By sth202 on 25/09/2008
Level: Bachelor Honours Degree (BA, BEng, BSc etc)
Page Number: 2 of 7 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
identity one has if living abroad. It has also been claimed that we each have more than one identity, and that each of these are “forms of social life” (Billig 1995: 175) and “discursively constructed according to audience, setting, topic, and substantive content” (Wodak et al 1999: 4). Wodak et al continue in deducing that (national) identities are therefore changeable, fragile, and constantly contradictory and general. This must be taken into account when analysing interview data.
In order to study this topic it was necessary to interview an Austrian national. I did not wish to be seen to be influencing her thoughts or speech and so consequently I used “symbolically-charged photography” (Meinhof and Galasiński 2000: 323) as a trigger in an attempt to provoke her real feelings about Austria. In this way I wanted her to begin a narrative of her own, in her own words, as these themselves could have their own hidden significance. Finnegan (1997, in Mackay 1997: 66-111) asserts that identity is inexplicit and is to be found in the narrative, which is always fluid and never the same. To put in simple terms, a narrative is the telling of a story, which, seemingly, we as human beings enjoy doing. These stories or narratives are formulated by culture, and they tell not only the obvious – what we are saying – but also of our identity. Wodak et al believe that using this process to create an identity makes it possible to “arrange and interpret, to rearrange and to reinterpret past events in one’s own life” (1999: 14). De Fina (2003: 29) remarks that “storytelling is a discursive practice marked by its insertion within certain conditions of production and reception.” That is to say, it is not only what is said, but what this is heard and interpreted as that matters, because as Cameron (2001: 124) explains, Critical Discourse Analysts profess that the manner in which certain realities are discussed, or rather the choices speakers make subconsciously when talking, are “not just random but ideologically patterned.” In other words, the unconscious choice of words and grammar depends on, for example, social or cultural experience, but we need to read between the lines to interpret the true meaning that is being conveyed.
For my interview I used eight images of famous Austrian buildings or scenes, well known individuals of Austrian nationality and their national crest, which I
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