1,721,020 research outputs found
“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)
Full text linkIn 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
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
"I’m Mary Brady. I go to Saint Agnes in Queens": Il personaggio irlandese di Mary in Sex and the City
No full textIn the first of the six seasons of HBO’s Sex and the City (1998-2004), Miranda Hobbes, a successful Harvard-educated attorney, and a cynical and pragmatic woman, establishes an unstable relationship with bartender Steve Brady; a son, Brady Hobbes, is born to the couple in the fourth season. After his birth, Miranda meets Mary Brady, Steve’s mother, who is a working-class woman, of Irish origin, in her sixties. In this article, through the linguistic tools of conversation analysis, pragmatics and stylistics, and through feminist television studies, the author examines the first conversation which Mary participates in (season 5, episode 2, 2002), and tries to identify the linguistic features through which her female figure and Irish working-class identity are constructed as stereotypical. Linguistic scrutiny testifies to the fact that the clichéd representation of Mary’s non-American, non-middle-class identity is built against Miranda’s socioeconomic and cultural representation, and that the two female characters are constructed as antithetical. Nevertheless, since it is the American woman, not the Irish woman, who is one of the four protagonists of the TV series, the audience is likely to share both that woman’s viewpoint, which therefore becomes dominant, and her negative judgment on Mary, which becomes final
Time and the Text of Sex and the City: The Last Conversation among the Four Female Characters in the American TV Series
No full textIn HBO’s Sex and the City (1998-2004), such topics as sex, love and friendship are discussed by four Manhattan-based white middle-class women in their late thirties who typify varied and contrasting role models. In this article, through conversation analysis, pragmatics and stylistics, the author examines the text of the final conversation among the four characters, which occurs in the penultimate episode of the last season (2004). The objective is to identify the linguistic features through which the four protagonists’ different personalities and ideologies are delineated, to study whether their identities and worldviews on sex, love and life have changed since the 1997 pilot show, and to reveal how and why their distinct value systems have altered over time. Linguistic scrutiny, validated by a more extensive consideration of the text of the entire TV series, uncovers that Carrie, throughout the six seasons, evolves from an open-minded inquisitive nature to a value-laden traditionally female dramatis persona. What is more, the fact that even the ideologically groundbreaking figures of Samantha and Miranda, along with Charlotte and Carrie, are finally provided with a regular partner and family and with a standard white middle-class lifestyle clearly conveys that, over time, the text of Sex and the City has gradually incarnated a mainstream value system and has increasingly come to represent more stereotypically female characters
Women and Witches in Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft and in James I’s Daemonologie: A Linguistic Analysis
No full textThe article is on “Women and Witches in Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft and in James I’s Daemonologie”. When editing the Italian edition of the city comedy The Devil Is an Ass by Ben Jonson and analysing the characters of devils and witches in Jacobean drama, the author consulted Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline treatises on demonology and witchcraft. In particular, she referred to two influential works, namely The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) by the sceptical scholar Reginald Scot, and Daemonologie (1597) by James I Stuart. Despite the contrasting viewpoints conveyed in Scot’s and James’ works, the author concludes that their descriptions of women and witches are not very different, since the picture that both authors paint of the female figure and of female nature is more stereotypical than real. In her article, the author examines the two writers’ representations of women and witches and the ideology behind them by selecting a passage from each text and studying these extracts from a linguistic perspective through structural and functional grammar, pragmatics, stylistics and the newer approach of feminist linguistics. Linguistic scrutiny reveals the main dissimilarity between the misogynous descriptions of the female figures in the two treatises. Whilst James simply hints at their alleged moral and intellectual defects, Scot also considers their supposedly weak physical appearance. On the one hand, James effectively manages to persuade his readers of his viewpoint, and achieves his perlocutionary goal without referring to the bodies of the alleged witches. On the other hand, Scot’s repeatedly mentioning their bodies in a derogatory fashion constantly infringes the Gricean maxims of Quantity and Relevance, since those remarks are dysfunctional to his discourse. It is thus notable that Scot, an author sceptical about witchcraft, who is presupposed by his Elizabethan and modern reader as regarding alleged witches as helpless victims, hence with pity and compassion, depicts them even more chauvinistically and conventionally than James, a renowned believer in the black arts
Ben Jonson Across Cultures: Bartholomew Fair’s Italian Adaptation
No full textBartholomew Fair, the Jacobean comedy by Ben Jonson (1614), was recently adapted and translated into Italian, in particular into Genoese dialect, by the Italian playwrights Mario Bagnara and Bartolomeo Rottondo. In this article, the author discusses their project by comparing the English source text (ST) and the Italian target text (TT), and by analysing Bagnara and Rottondo’s translational choices. In particular, the author applies the new methodology of translational stylistics, together with translation studies, stylistics and pragmatics, in order to examine the figure of and the very first lines uttered by Ursula, the “pig-woman” (BF, The Persons of the Play), and in order to study Jonson’s presentation of a Jacobean working woman and Bagnara and Rottondo’s linguistic and cultural translation of this figure
Friendliness, Aggressiveness and Coarseness: Scottish Groundskeeper Willie’s Linguistic Features in The Simpsons
No full textWillie, one of the recurring characters in the American animated TV series The Simpsons (Twentieth Century Fox, 1989-present), is the head groundskeeper at the elementary school in the fictional town of Springfield, and a Scottish immigrant, fiery-tempered and almost feral in appearance and behaviour. In this article, I study the Scottish national-ethnic stereotypes in a corpus of Willie’s utterances, and I investigate his conversational style with the people living in Springfield using a pragmatic approach and Searle’s (1976) taxonomy of illocutionary acts. My research objective is to analyse whether his conversational style in the hyperbolic discourse of the comic series contributes to conveying a stereotypical perception of the Scottish national identity; I thereby attempt to distinguish and reveal the linguistic and interactional characteristics which construct the dramatis persona of Willie as conventionally Scottish and non-American. This pragmatic scrutiny has disclosed that the Scottish immigrant is attributed with such value-laden characteristics as friendliness, aggressiveness and coarseness, which can be directly connected with his Scottish national identity. Nevertheless, the conversations he participates in and the activities he undertakes characterise him as a grotesque and ludicrous victim of both adults and children in the American town of Springfield. Accordingly, on the one hand, the groundskeeper’s Scottishness is, as Gray (2006, p. 64) points out, depicted as hyper-stereotypical and, thus, as axiomatically parodistic, while this character’s main discursive role in the TV series is, according to Rodaway (2003, p. 163), to act as a foil to the American people in Springfield. However, on the other hand, the equation of a victim, repeatedly outwitted by children, with an immigrant, constructed as a verbal and visual other from American culture and identity, can actually be, in Gray’s (2006, p. 64) words again, “a rather high risk strategy”, even within the humorous discourse of this hyperbolic TV series
Review of G.M. Anselmi (ed.), Dal primato allo scacco: I modelli narrativi italiani tra Trecento e Settecento, Roma, Carocci, 1998
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