First Take: In most academic usage these days, the term refers to a formal, systematic body of statements and vocabularies, such as a “medical discourse” that discusses the causes and symptoms of a disease in technical terms.
Deeper: In linguistics, discourse is a much broader term: typically it refers broadly to the occasions where language, either spoken or written, is used within a social context–much like, for instance, when people talk in a conversation or give a lecture. (In older uses, a “Discourse” on a given topic was in fact a lecture or a long reflective essay.) As I discuss in Chapter 4, such discourses are important resources of authority for many journalists (compare the entry in this Glossary on attribution). That is, journalists often “reach out” and use other discourses to build up their authority–for instance, if they’re writing about a new kind of warfare, or a new weather-forecasting technology, and so on. Indeed, because journalists typically write for the general public or publics, they might be seen as translating such discourses, or “importing” them out of specialized communities into wider awareness. In this respect, turning to a specialized discourse often acts very much like an internal “mode.” Mimicry (and sometimes mockery) of such modes is often a signature of postmodern forms of narrative journalism (Joan Didion is a good example here; also Michael Herr)–with the writer “pasting in” the ways that “official” people–generals, politicians, and so on–like to talk, often to ridicule how they do.
All that being said, it may be that more attention needs to be paid in literary-journalism studies for other dimensions of long-form journalists’ use of such discourses. For example, scholars in Composition and Rhetoric will often insist that discourses typically take place in what are called “discourse communities”–that is, as , discourses usually have intended or understood audiences. People write articles in law reviews, for instance, primarily for other judges and lawyers. As such, they typically make assumptions about what their audiences already know. An article in a law review, for instance, may use the word “discovery” to refer to a court process, not to the general sense of “finding something out.” And discovery, in the law, has lots of rules behind it. So, for journalists, the question is how you “capture” both those discourses and the implied rules only a specialist would recognize.
Other issues come into play, too. Because these discourse communities can reflect “ways of explaining things,” they often favor their way of explaining over others. So, when, you read one kind of discourse–say, an article by a political scientist–he or she may be implicitly asking you to not think, say, like an Historian for a while. A psychologist, likewise, might say that people act in a certain way because of inner drives or desires, whereas a mainline (nonbehavioral) economist might want us to measure the same people’s “cost benefit” situation. Strangely, then, one discourse might be a way of not thinking in another way. If so, what happens when a journalist uses one “explanation form” and not another?
And finally, some scholars of writing will point out that audiences know what the writer is “getting at” because of the context in which something is written. Certain historical references (like “Watergate” or “Iran-Contra”) become shorthands in everyday news stories. However, it’s often true that we’re reading a work of narrative journalism long after its immediate impact. Thinking critically about the discourses in the text we’re reading is often a way to “unearth” those contexts (with, of course, a little contextual research of your own). Another way to think about those discourses is they’re a little like the scaffolding holding up the background on a stage set: they’re really important, and looking closely at them explains a lot of what’s going on, on the journalist’s own stage set. That’s also why what are called ” Reception studies, or studies of misreadings by reviewers and audiences of reportage, often attend to the power or faulty adaptation of such discourses and contexts.
Suggested Readings: Michael Yavenditti, “John Hersey and the American Conscience: The Reception of Hiroshima,” Pacific Historical Review 43 (Feb. 1974): 22-49.