I wanted, by contrast, to venture into slightly newer territory. And on the visual score, a recent book which uses critical linguistics to analyse visual texts has only recently appeared and it would be very hard to compete with such a thorough-going work in the space of a single paper. Indeed, the idea of a 'social semiotics of the media' would seem to require a volume in its own right. But it is still a division which tends to send graduate students in conversation analysis out with their tape recorders when the air-waves are full of the very phenomena they want. But by the same token, many media specialists will find conversation-analytic approaches to, say, film dialogue, 'naive' in terms of their own criteria of relevance.
Film is supposed to be, above all, visual.
The work in this issue of Continuum challenges many of these ingrained assumptions - and their equivalents in linguistics and literary studies. What I mean by discourse analysis and theory would take some considerable space to explain. This would have to include work as diverse as that of Foucault and the Foucauldians and Derrida and the Derrideans - and it could not fail to involve brushes with some feminisms, Lacanian psychoanalysis and the Deleuze brigade. Thanks to David Wills for showing me the clipping from the New York Times . 5.