Representing Dublin: Critical Discourse Analysis and the language of tourist guides

The paper applies Critical Discourse Analysis to the language of tourism, in order to explore the ideological assumptions underlying the seemingly neutrally informative representation of a city that can be found in tourist guides. The basic hypothesis is that it is virtually impossible to represent a contemporary city without drawing on previous representations of that same city, and that each representation necessarily reflects its author’s position with reference to discourses other than tourism. More specifically, the paper draws on what Norman Fairclough termed “textually oriented discourse analysis” (Fairclough 1992: 37), and the theoretical approach and the terminology used throughout basically derive from his studies Discourse and Social Change and Analyzing Discourse (Fairclough 1992; 2003). Focusing on Dublin as a case study the paper shows to what extent, just like the city itself, the representation of a city can provide evidence of ongoing processes of redefinition and reconstitution of social, political and cultural identities. Dublin has recently indeed undergone major changes which make it a case in point for analysing how the intersection and interaction of social, political, economic and cultural discourses is enacted in the representation of this emerging capital city. Thus, using categories explored by Fairclough such as “intertextuality and interdiscursivity”, “inclusion, exclusion and order of information”, “recontextualization”, the introductory sections of famous guides to Dublin have been analysed so as to reveal how different tourist guides actually give voice to different worldviews, draw on and presuppose different texts and discourses, prove that they are aimed at different audiences, and potentially affect the behaviour of the reader-as-tourist in different ways.