Discursive violence

At Macalester (where I got my B.A.), we did a lot of textual analysis. Hegemony this, postmodernism that, blah blah. But here in grad school, we're not just analyzing texts. People here do textual interrogation. The bright light/Miranda rights/see-through mirror kind of interrogation? Or are we talking about strapping Marx to a chair and putting out cigarettes on his arms and breaking his fingers?