“Academia Catavencu”: A Challenge for Discourse Analysts

Abstract

This paper is meant as an attempt to show how by analysing the discourse of a newspaper article, we may uncover a certain culture in a specific period of its historical development. To this aim, I have chosen an article from a Romanian satirical newspaper, Academia Catavencu[1], which I found particularly interesting in that it poses several problems for the analysis. In my attempt, I shall rely on the analytical framework introduced by Brown and Yule (1989) and I will focus on two key issues, namely staging and coherence. Hopefully, the analysis will bring evidence in favor of the idea that a text can be regarded as an interaction between writer and reader.