Robert de Beaugrande

Robert-Alain de Beaugrande (1946 – June 2008 ) was an American text linguist and discourse analyst, one of the leading figures of the Continental tradition in the discipline. He was one of the developers of the Vienna School of Textlinguistik (Department of Linguistics at the University of Vienna), and published the seminal Introduction to Text Linguistics in 1981, with Wolfgang U. Dressler. He was also a major figure in the consolidation of critical discourse analysis.

Personal life According to census records, de Beaugrande was born James L Shoemaker in Colorado in 1946. He was raised in Missoula, Montana, where his father Theodore was a professor at The University of Montana. His mother was Eunice J Hankey Shoemaker, and he had a sister, Ellen Shoemaker, who died in 2003, the same year as their mother. and later as visiting professor in several universities in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.

Academic positions Throughout his career, de Beaugrande held professorial positions at numerous international institutions:

University of Florida, Gainesville University of Vienna, Austria University of Botswana, Gaborone United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain Federal University of Paraíba, João Pessoa, Brazil University of Primorska, Koper, Slovenia

Teaching style and personality De Beaugrande was known for his unconventional approach to academia and complex personality. According to former student Caspar van Helden, who studied under him at the University of Vienna in 1994, de Beaugrande "was certainly not the most easily approachable professor there, and his communication with students seemed a bit unpredictable."

However, according to van Helden, de Beaugrande's approach had underlying logic: he "tended to appreciate those who created complex questions, and never looked for easy answers. He scorned academic conventions, of which there were so very many in Vienna." His unconventional teaching methods included giving students exam questions weeks in advance along with their grades, which were consistently A's, reflecting his disregard for traditional academic assessment practices. He explained that the site was necessary because many of his works were difficult to access through traditional academic channels for several reasons: recent works not yet submitted for publication or under lengthy review processes; publications in obscure sources such as in-house journals of universities or academies of science; unpublished works rejected due to what he characterized as "the byzantine, clannish tactics of academic reviewing and publishing"; and controversial works addressing "sacred cows in our profession, such as grades, peer review, external examiners, and the stratified organisation of international conferences."

By 2004, he had expanded the site into what he called a "free library," which garnered over 14,000 visits and downloads by September 2005. De Beaugrande expressed particular satisfaction that his works were reaching readers worldwide who "could not possibly buy them," making his academic contributions accessible to scholars in developing countries and regions with limited resources.

Under the motto "**FREEDOM TO THE BOOKS!!**", de Beaugrande advocated for open access to knowledge, stating that he could not "reach out by means of expensive or hard-to-find books." His website provided scanned, edited, and reformatted versions of his academic works, with individual webpages kept under 300 KB for accessibility.

For readers in areas with difficult or unsafe Internet access, he offered to send free CD versions of his complete works, formatted for efficient printing.

Selected works Text, Discourse and Process: Toward a Multidisciplinary Science of Texts. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1980 Introduction to Text Linguistics (with Wolfgang Dressler). London: Longman, 1981. Text Production. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1984 Critical Discourse: A Survey of Contemporary Literary Theorists. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1988 New Foundations for a Science of Text and Discourse. Greenwich, CT: Ablex, 1997 A New Introduction to the Study of Text and Discourse. Uploaded to personal website June 2004.