Abstract

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) attempts to deal with social problems such as prejudice, inequality, and discrimination by critically analyzing how the mass media can exercise its power to produce ideological discourses. However, CDA done solely from the perspective of 'discourse' can prove to be too limiting. Not only is the term represented differently in social and linguistic theory, even among CDA analysts there is not complete agreement about the definition of the term. Therefore, explicitly describing 'discourse' itself and presenting it as a unified concept is rather challenging. The purpose of this study is to reconsider the concept of 'discourse' as discussed in the realm of CDA through a new approach of inserting a factor of 'agent' or 'subject' into the CDA theoretical frame. While CDA tends to concentrate on linguistic aspects, the material aspect of how the human agent occupying the subject position is involved in the process of encoding and decoding often goes ignored. In this study, N. Fairclough's frame of CDA is examined. Following this, the relationship between the process of text production and the way in which the existence of an agent is articulated in the discourse practice is discussed.