What is Critical in Critical Language Awareness?

Abstract

This essay raises the question of what is critical in Critical Language Awareness by drawing upon Hans-Georg Gadamer's development of the dialectic of experience, historically effected consciousness, and the dialectic of question and answer. The openness found to characterise these three events initiates the space or distance by which the critical instance can be realised. The critical instance is a dialectical process whereby the self is separated from itself in the process of appropriating the new, the foreign, the unknown. Ricoeur defines this distance or distantiation in his analysis of the act of appropriating literary works, and shows how reading the work of fiction opens the reader to strategies of suspicion such as found with the Marxian critique of ideology and Freudian psychoanalysis. Such strategies have as their goal emancipation from societal and individual false consciousness and illusion. What is critical in Critical Language Awareness is the space of distantiation from which new understanding dialectically unfolds and new ways of perceiving and acting and new discourse practices can arise.