Reviews for Discourse and Contemporary Social Change

The average rating for Discourse and Contemporary Social Change based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-07-21 00:00:00 Cathy Wiggins This book is composed of a selection of papers that had been delivered at an international conference held in Palermo in 2005. I would have loved to have been at that conference. The breadth of papers and the various methods used would have made this a week to remember. I'm not going to try to cover all of the papers here - that would be too much - but I do want to touch on some of the recurring themes and hopefully to focus on the last three or four papers, which I found particularly interesting. Some of the major themes in this volume have to do with Italians, or rather not just Italians so much as American Italians. I hadn't really thought about American Italians before reading this. But what I found most interesting was the idea that they were mostly an oral culture, and the problem with oral cultures in societies that stress assimilation is that, well, they are likely to be assimilated. There is also the fact that the US sees itself as a 'melting pot'. So that often although people will say that they are Italian American today, they might, and with equal justification, say that they are Irish American or German American tomorrow or the day after. There is a lovely line in one of the papers where the author says that when you learn a language you normally start with some nouns, then acquire some phrases and finally develop to whole conversations and ways of speaking. The history of Italian American literature has basically gone backwards from this process. Now such literature is likely to only contain a few Italian nouns - mostly for food - whereas there was a time when whole paragraphs would have been in Italian. The other theme that is obvious in this collection, and ought to be anticipated, given the time it was written, is the idea of the war on terror and the consequences of the various US adventures in Iraq and how these were reported. There are a couple of papers that analyse this using corpus linguistics which I want to mention. This is actually a fascinating way of looking at texts. A lot of sociolinguistics isn't really possible without advances in computer technology that have enabled the analysis of very large quantities of text for patterns and the co-location of words and phrases in relatively quick time. I'm always interested in these things - I was born in the 20th century, and a lot of the 20th century was concerned with 'hidden' truths- think Freud, as a case in point. And this seems to be the perfect way to search for hidden truths. You get 10,000 articles on the Iraq war and let the computer look for patterns and words or phrases that always seem to appear together. Hard to notice these on your own, but something that is remarkably easy for a computer to do. Of course, the hidden pattern doesn't really show itself as if out of no where - you still need to interpret what you find and therefore you are going to need a theory to explain why these particular words or phrases should appear together - but there is something lovely in the brute fact of such 'evidence'. An excellent example of this is Carolyn Clark's article, 'A War of Words: A linguistic analysis of BBC embedded reports during the Iraq conflict'. There had been an inquiry that had found that the BBC journalists had not been biased in their reporting - however, Clark's analysis of their language used in their reports, mostly based on a corpus analysis, shows that the journalists did in fact provide a negative appraisal of the intervention, even though this was often presented as being 'objective'. She uses, in particular, differences in the use of inclusive 'we' and exclusive 'they', various forms of modality and other linguistic patterns to show journalistic bias against the conflict. She compares embedded journalist reports with general reports and then compares the differences in the language used in both. One of the lovely examples is her finding that the word 'believe' is in almost every case (all but one) to the right of 'they'. It is never linked with 'we'. This presents what the journalist is being told by those around them, but also their own interpretation of that information presented in a way that makes the information appear more objective. But given they are embedded with 'them', the journalists could just as easily said, 'we believe'. But this distancing becomes more obvious when the correlation is between 'they' and 'say' - which is basically a case of the journalist saying, 'the military told me this', and in saying that, there is an implication that it may not actually be true. This is stressed by frequent cases where the journalist will report something they have been told - that a town had been taken - and then undermine that immediately by saying something like - and yet three days later fighting continues. The conclusion drawn is that the choice of language by the journalists showed that they were not as impartial about the progress of the war as the British Government might have preferred them to be, but that a lot of this had been hidden in various ways in the language chosen. The chapters of this that I particularly want to mention, though, all come near the very end of the book, in fact, I found section four of this book by far the most interesting - even though I did enjoy virtually all of the chapters. The reason why I found this part quite so interesting is because I'm utterly fascinated by multi-modality and how multimedia texts 'mean'. For instance, the chapter by Unger and Sunderland 'Gendered Discourses in a Contemporary Animated Film: Subversion and confirmation of gender stereotypes in Shrek' was really a lovely paper. A lot of analysis (or what passes for analysis) of multimodal texts (texts with images, music, words and so on) often treat everything other than the words as if they were decoration. Or the analyst says something quite banal about the 'non-words' parts of the text, you know, something like Shrek is green, most monsters in fiction are green, in this case the film stays on standard fairy tale ground. But there are things that can only be expressed in images or sounds - and often a text's 'intertextuality' is only made possible through the images or music that is presented. The case in point given here is during the films Robin Hood sequence where Princess Fiona - rather than being 'saved' by a French accented Robin Hood, 'takes out' Robin and his merry men Matrix Kung Fu style. This reference to the Matrix film is not made in the spoken text, but purely visually. As such, it is difficult to talk about the implications of the relationship between these two texts, even on the level of why such a reference in such a film might 'work' without discussing these visual elements. Other instances of intertextual references are made in the analysis and these are also frequently portrayed visually, rather than in the dialogue of the film. And that means that a large part of understanding the film relies on being able to interpret visual elements and references. But the chapter you really ought to read if you possibly can is Maxine Lipson's 'The Ubiquitous Machine: Visual texts in the BBC coverage of the Iraqi conflict'. The analysis is really interesting, but what is most interesting is that she finds this was a war between machines, rather than soldiers. She even quotes an American soldier who says, "We killed about uh 24 armored vehicles and a couple of trucks'. There are lots of images presented from the news of the battles, but rather than showing the dead Iraqis - which the verbal text often discusses - instead we are shown burning machines or guns spread across the ground. This use of metaphor and metonymy obviously sanitises the images, but it also says something very interesting about how we now think of war. War is a technological realm more than a physical one, one that is increasingly understood as fought by our overwhelmingly more complicated machines (think drones) and from a distance. Destroying the enemy's machines is seen as the quickest way to 'win', the human cost inside the tank's billowing smoke is hidden in all senses. This is a fascinating collection of essays - I also particularly liked one of the last essays that looked at the use of swear words by Italian characters in US films. How could you not find something like that interesting?

Review # 2 was written on 2013-08-04 00:00:00 Ringo Inlow I had to read this as part of my graduate level poli sci class. Started out surprisingly readable, but then he whipped out the numbers and I kept falling asleep.