Ruth Wodak, Rudolf de Cillia, Martin Reisigl and Karin Liebhart: The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Second Edition. Transl. by Angelika Hirsch, Richard Mitten and J. W. Unger.

Abstract

Writing a review of the second edition of The Discursive Construction of National Identity has been an extremely difficult task. How to write an evaluation of an iconic volume, praised already everywhere and by everyone in the academe? Just one look at online book sellers brings ample examples of tributes, admirations and recommendations of Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl and Liebhart’s work. A publishing history of the volume also speaks a lot about its credentials. At first it was a German edition by Suhrkamp in 1998; this was followed by an abbreviated and translated text for its first English edition by Edinburgh University Press in 1999, reprinted in 2003 and transferred to digital print in 2005. And finally an extended and revised 2009 second edition shows how important this book was, is and almost certainly will remain for academics and students of many disciplines within the broadly defined social sciences. It is after all a book that inspires many. Its ever interesting topic of nation and identity, focus on sameness and uniqueness in contrast to other work within this field which prefers to concentrate on otherness, its stimulating deployment of other important concepts from related disciplines, such as ‘imagined community’ and habitus, to the study of discourse makes this book widely appreciated and well regarded. By the same token, vigorous methodology of a discourse-historical approach developed in the Vienna School of Discourse Analysis, immaculate examination of multi-genred data (i.e. commemorative speeches, media texts, focus group interviews, qualitative interviews) showing both discursive strategies and argumentation schemes but also forms of realization, richness of linguistic extracts to illustrate authors’ point, all these features turned this book into an exceptional example of a distinguished research monograph. The authors choose to focus on the discursive data that was harvested around the celebratory and commemorative events of 1995, the year of the 50th anniversary of the Second Republic, also the year of Austria’s accession to the European Union. Thematically, they concentrate on topics of common past, present and future, common culture and territory as well as on the concept of homo nationalis.

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