Week 8: Gee's Discourse Analysis: A few Questions

In the interest of trying to get ready to write an analysis of my own, for my response this week I want to primarily focus on Gee’s 7th chapter on Discourse Analysis. I have two major sets of issues and questions to address. 

First:

Gee notes at the beginning of the chapter that “Making sense is always a social and variable matter:  what makes sense to one community may not make sense to another.  Thus, to understand sense-making in language it is necessary to understand the ways in which language is embedded in society and social institutions (such as families and schools)” (112). 

If it is true that to understand the language you must understand how language functions in a society, to what degree can people like me interested in old texts from societies long past make any sense of texts? For that matter, can an outsider ever really come to have the kind of insider knowledge that Dracula so vehemently longs for in Gee’s example?  And, ethically, if we as researchers do not have an insiders knowledge, what right do we have to analyze and try to make meaning out of a text? 

Second:

I also have some questions about Gee’s system for discourse analysis.  In what he calls his “five inter-related linguistic systems” that work together to “constitute the sensefulness of a text” (116) he outlines his procedure for discourse analysis.  My first frustration with Gee’s analysis methods is that while he claims to be interested in texts of any kind—oral or written, one system really doesn’t seem to apply much to written text.  It is hard to imagine prosody as a tool when looking at writing.  I suppose you might look at line breaks or punctuation for clues about prosody?

I also wonder about the ways that hand gestures, facial expressions, illustrations, or paratextual apparatuses might fit in to Gee’s schema.  They seem to me to be as much a part of the discourse, as much a part of linguistic meaning-making as the written or spoken word.  For example, Old English manuscripts often have marginalia—doodlings, illustrations, figures that act as parts of the discourse and can help readers significantly in terms of making sense of the whole text.  

So my question is, where do they fit? Perhaps in “Contextualization signals”? I’m not sure that this is a good fit though. Would it be useful to put some of these sorts of discursive tools into a new system of analysis?