Fordrande ord : en kritisk diskursanalys av konsertinstitutioners informativa texter inför konserter

Sammanfattning: The aim of this master’s thesis is to explore concert institutions’ informative texts prior to upcoming concerts – texts in promotional materials and descriptive texts in programme papers. The thesis is carried out from a critical discourse analytical perspective. The discourse analysis is focusing on finding the texts’ messages and it asks the question: To whom are these texts addressed? Theoretical support is mainly taken from Foucault’s theory about the relation between power and knowledge. On the basis of this theoretical framework, Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis (CDA) is applied to an analysis of informative texts from Swedish public financed concert institutions. In addition to a linguistic text analysis the discourse analysis also turns to the texts’ intertextual and interdiscursive relationships and to the texts’ historical, cultural and social contexts. The results show that the texts, analysed in this study, primarily address individuals already initiated and established within the discourse. The texts are also addressing individuals not yet belonging to the discourse who, in order to become established within the discourse, have to acquire the cultural and social characteristics that are requested by the discourse. The discourse analysis indicates that the language of the informative texts contain an exclusive mechanism. With this mechanism, the texts constitute a barrier hindering access to the art form. Based on these findings, it is concluded that concert institutions for Western art music could be more generally inviting by using a more inclusive language in their informative texts prior to upcoming concerts.As I haven’t found any previous Swedish or other Nordic studies of texts that are published prior to upcoming concerts, it seems likely that a small research gap has been discovered.