Document Type
Review
Abstract
[First paragraph]
John Myles’ Bourdieu, Language and the Media is a comprehensive argument for media and communication studies to fully engage with the late Pierre Bourdieu’s views on language. While Bourdieu is influential in these academic disciplines, Myles convincingly puts the case that there has been an “overplay” of Bourdieu’s concept of field in the concentration on how media and journalism are structured, but avoidance of using Bourdieu’s analysis of how media and journalism relate to language and the “symbolic violence” enacted through language. Myles tackles criticisms of Bourdieu in the various linguistic/socio-linguistic schools in a constructive engagement requiring a dense navigation of a series of conceptual frameworks, drawing on Bourdieu’s major work on the subject Language and Symbolic Power (Bourdieu and Thompson 1991) first published in French thirty years ago. He puts forward a strong case for the validity of a sociological approach to language in the face of continued linguistic domination of the subject. The close examination of Bourdieu’s ideas sets up his argument for the need for fuller application of the theory in studies of the media. Myles demonstrates how this might be done and how it might add to media analysis in the second half of the book through five case studies – on local reporting, photojournalism, opinion polls, text messaging and local radio.
Repository Citation
Beachill, Mark. "Review of Bourdieu, Language and the Media, by John Myles." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 11, no. 4, 2011, pp. 1–5. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol11/iss4/21