710 research outputs found
Stereotyping Scotland: Groundskeeper Willie’s illocutionary acts in The Simpsons
No full textAn earlier version of this article was published as: Virdis, D. F. 2012. Friendliness, aggressiveness and coarseness: Scottish Groundskeeper Willie’s linguistic features in The Simpsons. NAWA: Journal of Language and Communication 6.1: 127-150.This article explores the Scottish character of Groundskeeper Willie in the American animated sitcom The Simpsons with a pragmatic and social-psychological approach. It firstly introduces Willie’s linguistic and visual features, the sample of three episodes the analysis is based on, Scottish stereotypes in Lindsay’s (1997) sociological research, and Searle’s (1976) taxonomy of illocutionary acts (representatives or assertives, directives, commissives, expressives and declarations). Secondly, the turns uttered by the groundskeeper in the sample are classified by applying Searle’s taxonomy, and his illocutionary acts are examined in their contexts and compared with the list of national-ethnic Scottish stereotypes compiled by Lindsay. This study demonstrates that Willie’s illocutionary acts and the stereotypes they convey depict him as a figure characterised by positive traits; nevertheless, the responses his illocutionary acts are met with not only counter his pleasant aspects, but also ultimately represent the Scottish groundskeeper as a ludicrous victim of his American fellow [email protected] Francesca Virdis is an Associate Professor of English Language and Translation at the University of Cagliari. She is a steering group member of the International Ecolinguistics Association. She is the author of Serialised Gender: A Linguistic Analysis of Femininities in Contemporary TV Series and Media (2012), which was awarded the Italian Association of English Studies Book Prize 2013. Her current research interests include ecostylistics and metaphor theory.University of Cagliari, ItalyAitken, A. J. & McArthur, T. (eds.). 1979. Languages of Scotland. Edinburgh: Chambers.Alberti, J. (ed.). 2003. Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.Armstrong, N. 2004. Voicing The Simpsons from English into French: A story of variable success. The Journal of Specialised Translation 2: 97-109.Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things With Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Barra, L. 2008. Springfield, Italia. Processi produttivi e variazioni di significato nell’adattamento italiano di una serie televisiva statunitense. Observatorio (OBS*) Journal 4: 113-136.Beard, D. S. 2003. Local satire with global reach: Ethnic stereotyping and cross-cultural conflicts in The Simpsons. In: J. Alberti (ed.), Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture, 273-291. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.Brown, A. & Logan, C. (eds). 2006. The Psychology of The Simpsons. Dallas: BenBella Books.Cantor, P. A. 1999. The Simpsons: Atomistic politics and the nuclear family. Political Theory 27.6: 734-749.Cohen, E. A. 1998. Homer Simpson: Classic clown. The Simpsons Archive, available at http://www.simpsonsarchive.com/other/papers/eac.paper.html, last accessed December 2020.Dossena, M. 2005. Scotticisms in Grammar and Vocabulary: Like Runes upon a Standin’ Stane?. Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers.Ferrari, C. 2009. Dubbing The Simpsons: Or how Groundskeeper Willie lost his kilt in Sardinia. Journal of Film and Video 61.2: 19-37.Fusari, S. 2007. Idioletti e dialetti nel doppiaggio italiano de I Simpson. Quaderni del CeSLiC: Occasional Papers, Centro di Studi Linguistico-Culturali (CeSLiC), Bologna, available at http://amsacta.cib.unibo.it/archive/00002182/01/Fusari_OP_COMPLETO.pdf, last accessed December 2020.Gray, J. 2006. Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality. London/ New York: Routledge.Groening, M. 2001-2010. The Simpsons. Seasons 1-20 (home video releases). Fox Broadcasting CompanyGrundy, P. 2008. Doing Pragmatics, 3rd edition. London: Arnold.Hopkins, N. & Reicher, S. 1997. Constructing the nation and collective mobilization: A case study of politicians’ arguments about the meaning of Scottishness. In: C.C. Barfoot (ed.), Beyond Pug’s Tour: National and Ethnic Stereotyping in Theory and Literary Practice, 313-338. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi.Horowitz, J. 1999. Mmm ... television: A study of the audience of The Simpsons. The Simpsons Archive, available at http://www.simpsonsarchive.com/other/papers/jh.paper.html, last accessed December 2020.Hughes, A., Trudgill, P. & Watt, D. (eds). 2005. English Accents and Dialects: An Introduction to Social and Regional Varieties of English in the British Isles. London: Arnold.Lamont, C. 1997. The stereotype Scot and the idea of Britain. In: C. C. Barfoot (ed.), Beyond Pug’s Tour: National and Ethnic Stereotyping in Theory and Literary Practice, 339-350. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi.Levinson, S. C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Lindsay, I. 1997. The uses and abuses of national stereotypes. Scottish Affairs 20: 133-148.Mazzon, G. 1994. Le lingue inglesi: Aspetti storici e geografici. Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica.McCrum, R. et al. 1987. The Story of English. London: Faber and Faber/BBC Books.Mullin, B. 1999. The Simpsons, American satire. The Simpsons Archive, available at http://www.simpsonsarchive.com/other/papers/bm.paper.html, last accessed December 2020.Puddu, N. & Virdis, D. F. 2014. Dalla Scozia alla Sardegna: Stereotipi e tratti bandiera di Groundskeeper Willie/Willie il Giardiniere dei Simpson. In: A. Dettori (ed.), Dalla Sardegna all’Europa: Lingue e letterature regionali, 338-354. Milan: Franco Angeli.Rodaway, P. 2003. Space, character and critique: South Asian identity in The Simpsons. In: T. Shakur and K. D’Souza (eds.), Picturing South Asian Culture in English: Textual and Visual Representations, 162-175. Liverpool: Open House Press.Sbisà, M. 2009. Speech act theory. In: J. Verschueren & J.-O. Östman (eds.), Key Notions for Pragmatics, 229-244. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Searle, J. R. 1976. A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society 5.1: 1-23.Stangor, C. (ed.). 2000. Stereotypes and Prejudice: Essential Readings. Philadelphia: Psychology Press.Tomaiuolo, S. 2007. Translating “America’s most nuclear family” into Italian: Dubbing and cultural adaptation in The Simpsons. Translation and Interpreting Studies 2.2: 43-73.Turner, C. 2005. Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Documented an Era and Defined a Generation. Cambridge (MA): Da Capo Press.Turpin, A. 2005. The strange world of oor grown-up Wullie. The Sunday Times 23rd October.Verschueren, J. & Östman, J.-O. (eds.). 2009. Key Notions for Pragmatics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Waltonen, K. 2000. We’re all pigs: Representations of masculinity in The Simpsons. The Simpsons Archive, available at http://www.simpsonsarchive.com/other/papers/kw.paper.html, last accessed December 2020.Weinstein, D. 1998. Of mice and Bart: The Simpsons and the postmodern. In: C. DegliEsposti (ed.), Postmodernism in the Cinema, 61-72. New York: Berghahn Books.32 (1/2021)163
Polite Interaction or Cooperative Interaction? Bree’s Conversational Style in ABC’s Desperate Housewives
No full textThe author analyses the character of Bree Van de Kamp, one of the protagonists of the American TV series Desperate Housewives, and some of the conversations in the pilot show in which she participates. In particular, the author examines her conversational style, interactional behaviour and politeness and cooperation strategies towards her family and neighbours through the theoretical frameworks of Leech’s Politeness principle and Grice’s Cooperative principle. Linguistic investigation reveals her unbalanced personality. The conversational means she uses not only produce a perlocutionary effect of distance from the other, but also lay bare her traditional ideology and the mainstream female role model she struggles to incarnate: on the one hand she communicates her obsessive compulsion to behave in this way, and on the other hand her psychosis and her loss of contact with reality, two mental states attributable to the impossibility of fully personifying an allegedly perfect female role model
Sexuality, Masculinities & Co. in the Limericks from the Victorian Erotic Magazine The Pearl
No full textThe author employs feminist stylistics, along with language & gender and language & sexuality, to explore a number of erotic limericks which appeared in the first issue of The Pearl, a Victorian pornographic magazine published from 1879 to 1881. The author examines the language of sexuality and of eroticism in the poems, and how it is employed to describe the bodies and actions of the female, male and even animal characters portrayed in the texts under scrutiny, ironically called “nursery rhymes” by their anonymous author(s).
In the introductory section to her article, the author presents the pornographic magazine The Pearl, also called A Journal of Facetiae and Voluptuous Reading, and introduces Victorian sexuality and masculinity, while clearly stating the objectives of her study. She then analyses the discursive structure and the textual genre of the limerick, concentrating on the prototypical addresser-addressee interaction in relation to the function of the genre itself and to the textual achievement of hyperbolic comedy. Next she investigates the lexical level of the ‘nursery rhymes’, focussing principally on the nature of sexual desire and on the use of coarse language and lexemes denoting or referring to body parts; she then treats the resulting strategy of cropping and the commodification of human bodies. Finally she discusses the erotic poems through the deployment of Hallidayan functional grammar, more precisely of the experiential metafunction, scrutinising those “prototypical and non-prototypical realisations of functional process types and participants that effectively convey sexuality on the one hand and male dominance of female figures on the other”, and analysing how that male control is wielded over females and animals.
The author’s ultimate aim is to show how the models of femininity and of masculinity represented in the erotic limericks are the product of a hegemonic chauvinist ideology teamed up with a dominant heterosexual ideology; at the same time, she demonstrates that masculine hegemony is created and maintained through the denial of femininity, namely, through compliance with the value system of Victorian white military masculinity. The linguistic application in the diachronic context which is implied confirms the appropriacy of stylistics as an analytical tool which can confirm or reject hypotheses formed by others as well as by its own research
Representing Female Clumsiness: The Figure of Susan in ABC’s Desperate Housewives
No full textThe author analyses the clumsy character of Susan Mayer, an illustrator of children’s books, from the American TV series Desperate Housewives (2004-present), produced by ABC. More precisely, the author examines Susan’s conversational style and interactional behaviour towards the plumber Mike Delfino and the estate agent Edie Britt in a scene from the pilot show (2004). Through the linguistic theoretical frameworks of conversation analysis, pragmatics and stylistics, and through feminist television studies, the author tries to demonstrate that this scene describes her as a stereotypical female protagonist — the powerless woman in need of advice and guidance. This feature may be effective from a narrative and comical standpoint, but linguistic scrutiny shows that it has negative and clichéd connotations and, most importantly, is far from being an instance of an unbiased representation of a female figure
Salvadore Vidale e l'Urania sulcitana. Sant'Antioco: un santo eroe sardo, barocco, teatrale
No full textLa figura e la produzione di Salvadore Vidale necessitano un’attenzione non anacronistica che collochi l’autore nell’epoca sua, e che sappia cogliere le specificità sue personali, la sua parabola biografica, il suo specifico e particolare essere stato al mondo. Un lavoro né facile né di breve durata, ma paziente e impegnativo. Questo contributo vuole essere soltanto un primo approccio e una provvisoria riflessione sull’opera per la quale Salvadore Vidale è meglio conosciuto, vale a dire l’Urania sulcitana. De sa Vida, Martyriu, & Morte de su Benaventuradu S. Antiocu, Patronu de sa Isola de Sardigna, pubblicata a Sassari nel 1638 per i tipi di Iuan Francisco Bribo.3 Un approccio ai suoi modi poetici e alla poetica sua stessa, tanto ben inseriti nell’aura barocca, per stile e per prospettiva di scrittura.The figure and production of Salvadore Vidale require a non-anachronistic attention that places the author in his time, and that knows how to grasp his personal specificities, his biographical parable, his specific and particular being in the world. A job that is neither easy nor short, but patient and demanding. This contribution is intended to be only a first approach and a provisional reflection on the work for which Salvadore Vidale is best known, namely Urania sulcitana. De sa Vida, Martyriu, & Morte de su Benaventuradu S. Antiocu, Patronu de sa Isola de Sardigna, published in Sassari in 1638 for the types of Iuan Francisco Bribo. inserted in the baroque aura, for style and perspective of writing
“Lay down branch roads, provide town sites, build barracks”: A Practical Stylistic Investigation of Hyde Clarke’s Colonization, Defence, and Railways in Our Indian Empire (1857)
No full textIn his treatise Colonization, Defence, and Railways in Our Indian Empire (1857), Hyde Clarke wholeheartedly approves of Indian colonial railways and advocates the need for the British to bring about technological progress in the subcontinent. The main research purpose of this article is to provide stylistic evidence of how Clarke relays and constructs his Anglocentric and imperial viewpoint on Indian railways. The article firstly introduces the figure of Clarke and his railway pamphlet, and discusses the keywords colonialism and colonization as defined in two authoritative nineteenthcentury dictionaries of the English language and in colonial and postcolonial studies. Secondly, moving from this field and from the field of postcolonial stylistics, the stylistic methodology defined by Ron Carter as “practical stylistics” is applied to thirteen sequences from the treatise including the keyword colonization. Finally, the definitions of colonialism and colonization are compared with Clarke’s notion of colonization as emerging from the text. This linguistic analysis hence identifies and explores the stylistic strategies utilised by the author – mainly stylistic choices at word- and phrase-level, syntactic structures and the pragmatic functions of these devices – and reveals the ways in which he conveys his colonial mental attitude to the Indian reality
Strategie e configurazioni allegoriche nel Laberinto de Fortuna di Juan de Mena
No full textIl Laberinto de Fortuna (1444) di Juan de Mena è costruito su tre livelli testuali: quello più strettamente allegorico, relativo alla problematica della conoscenza e al rapporto Fortuna-Provvidenza, nonché alla problematica del tempo; quello storico-politico; e quello morale. Uno dei problemi principali della rappresentazione allegorica risiede proprio nella rappresentazione del tempo, tramite la quale emerge pure la concezione di esso da parte dell’Autore.
La strategia testuale allegorica del Laberinto è in larga misura basata su un duplice divaricamento: quello fra l’io-visionario e l’io-empirico; e quello relativo al tempo, in quanto la ruota del presente gira in maniera vorticosa, mentre quella del passato e quella del futuro sono immobili: ed è da qui che prende corpo l’idea che la fortuna è essenzialmente il tempo nella sua ardua problematicità. Inoltre i due termini del discorso allegorico di Juan de Mena, la Provvidenza e la Fortuna, hanno una rappresentazione diversa: la prima è un’ipostasi nata dalla capacità visionaria trascendentale dell’io; l’altra è soprattutto un’assenza, una pura fattualità che rimane indeterminata, de-personificata o che comunque non varca la soglia della personificazione. Come, ugualmente, assente è il labirinto, il quale risulta essere infine nient’altro che l’assenza di discernimento in una mente non guidata da Provvidenza; ed anche un labirinto eminentemente testuale entro cui il lettore deve sapersi districare per venire a capo del significato dell’opera.Juan de Mena’s Laberinto de Fortuna (1444) is built on three textual levels: a strictly allegorical one ˗
related to the problem of knowledge, the relationship between Fortune and Providence and the problem of
Time ˗ an historical-political level and a moral one. One of the main problems of Juan de Mena’s
allegorical representation lies in the representation of Time, so that, by means of this performance, the
author also shows and suggests us his own concept of Time.
The textual allegorical strategy of the Laberinto is largely based on a double divergence: on the one hand
the text shows a divergence between the visionary-self and the experiential-self, and, on the other hand, it
shows a divergence related to time, since, effectively, the only spinning wheel is the wheel of the present,
whereas the wheel of the past and the wheel of the future remain motionless. From here stems the idea that
Fortune is essentially the Time in its arduous complexity.
Moreover, the two terms of Juan de Mena’s allegorical discourse, Providence and Fortune, are represented
in opposite ways: the first is an hypostasis deriving from the visionary and transcendental ‘self’ of the
author; the second is primarily an absence, a pure factuality remaining undetermined, de-personified, and
not crossing the threshold of personification.
Similarly, the labyrinth itself is absent, in a way that means the lack of discernment, in a mind not guided
by Providence. Finally, the labyrinth/laberinto performed by Juan de Mena, turns to be eminently a textual
labyrinth, where the reader needs to disentangle to get to the bottom of its meaning
Frans Francken III (ambito) Compagnia musicale galante
No full textin "Il piacere del collezionista.Disegni e dipinti della collezione Riva del Museo di Bassano del Grappa", catalogo della mostra,Bassano, 1 nov.2008-15 febbr.2008, a cura di G. Ericani e F. Millozzi, Padova, Il Poligrafo 2008 pp.180-18
Colors in Medieval Art. Theories, Matter, and Light from Suger to Grosseteste (1100–1250)
No full textProjected color saturates our world of images and screens, leading to a dissociation of color from material realities through its cultural attachment to light and the efflorescence of optics. Under these conditions, it is difficult to imagine a past where color was an eminently material, cultural, and social object. This book argues that color is and was a central "cultural object" within art history, a fact first elucidated through an examination of the debates and difficulties of color in language, theology, science, and philosophy. Following this overview of medieval aesthetical debates, the author pursues two pivotal case studies which span the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: the Basilica of Saint-Denis and the Cathedral of Lincoln, respectively connected to the figures of the abbot Suger and the bishop Robert Grosseteste. Prominent thinkers and concepteurs of sacred spaces and images, they both confronted existing theories of color and optics, and the theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The case studies both center the art of stained glass, a revolutionary medium that blurs the boundaries between color, materiality, and light. Emerging strongly throughout this beautifully illustrated volume are traces of a central Middle Ages in which color played a fundamental yet groundbreaking role at the crossroads of aesthetic, intellectual, and theological issues
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