The aim of the article is to reflect on the communication model of fake news, starting from the assumption that fake news items are not mere falsehoods (e.g., trivial lies) nor something completely new.Drawing inspiration from the work of Umberto Eco, I will investigate the idea that today’s viral fake news can be aligned with the hermetic paradigm he outlined. Then I will consider another communicative model: that of gossip. Thanks to these two models, I will support (...) the thesis that fake news are not something to eliminate or to correct according to the criterion of evidence or truth, but rather something to live with, corresponding to a potentiality of discourse, that is to detect and to analyze. (shrink)

This study compares the use of interactional metadiscourse in a British newspaper, the Daily Mail, and a British news magazine, The Economist, in reporting on the Brexit referendum. We adopted Hyland’s (2005a:48–54) framework to analyze hedges, boosters, attitude markers, engagements, and self-mentions. One hundred news articles were randomly selected from online archives from February to June in 2016, during which time the debatable issue was discussed ardently. Quantitative and qualitative results of this study revealed both similarities and differences (...) between the newspaper and the news magazine in the use of interactional metadiscourse. For example, quantitatively, the frequencies of boosters in both genres were similar; however, the newspaper used much more engagement markers and self-mentions whereas the magazine used more hedges and attitude markers. Qualitatively, while most self-mentions were the same in both genres, a unique choice of self-mentions was found in the news magazine. (shrink)

Property transaction reports are a hybrid genre that combines the characteristics of news reports and advertisements. However, they are different from the traditional hybridity of advertorials, which carry a full-blown label of ‘advertisement’ or ‘promotional material’ and may repeat the name of a product or service many times. Property transaction reports, as an emerging genre in Hong Kong property magazines, combine the voices of property agencies and journalists in a very subtle and sophisticated manner, which is partly made possible (...) by the ambiguous local citing framework. Although the genre is a more successful mix of voices than advertorials, this is not the result of a conscious attempt to mix two genres. Indeed, it is the result of how two ‘communities of practice’ accommodate their practices to accomplish their tasks. This highlights the importance of ‘practice’ in understanding the complex issue of intertextuality. (shrink)

In corporate social responsibility reporting, companies are expected to fully disclose the negative social and environmental impacts of their activities. This study investigates how Chinese companies respond to this challenge by analyzing the representations of occupational fatalities and injuries in 92 CSR reports from 37 Chinese Fortune 500 companies. A move-step analysis was performed on one part of the CSR report, which is the section providing information on occupational incidents. It was found that the negative information was typically disclosed via (...) four rhetorical moves, which are ‘preparing the reader’, ‘delivering the bad news’, ‘mitigating the bad news’ and ‘reassuring the reader’. Communicating bad news through the four moves helps manage the reader’s perception of the reporting company and its CSR performance. The study calls for greater attention to the impression-managing aspects of companies’ self-disclosure of organizational bad news. (shrink)

Verb tenses play an important role in managing deictic relations between the narrator, the audience and the events happening in the story world. Across languages, the Simple Past is considered the conventional story-telling tense, reflecting the prototypical deictic configuration of stories in which the narrator is positioned at some distance from the events unfolding in the story. The Simple Present, on the other hand, is considered a marked option for narration, assumed to automatically result in a shift to a subjective (...) perspective. This paper reports on an analysis of a corpus made up of Dutch fictional short stories, news reports and feature articles. The results suggest that conventions for use and interpretation of verb tenses in narrative contexts are in fact genre-dependent. In the news genres, the Simple Present tense dominated in narration. This did not automatically result in a subjective mode or narration, but was naturally used to express a default narration of story events that temporally overlap with the temporal deictic center of the communicative ground. These findings suggest that previous analyses of verb tenses in relation to narration reflect an over-generalization based on the situational characteristics of prototypical narrative genres such as literary fiction and personal anecdotes. (shrink)

As a type of public discourse closely related to litigation practices, Chinese legal news reports incorporate the important progress in China’s judicial reform. Meanwhile, due to the competitive pressure and driven by profit, Chinese legal news reports are characteristic of an evident trend of marketization. This article examines how and to what extent sensationalism invades Chinese legal news reports. The research methodology combines the theoretical paradigms of critical discourse analysis and genre analysis, with particular attention paid to (...) the notions of genre and interdiscursivity. The data include 70 legal news reports in Legal Daily. Analytical results show that Chinese legal news reports, although being a highly institutional genre, include a number of sensational strategies which promote the restructuring of legal news reports in China. (shrink)

RESUMO O objetivo do artigo é aperfeiçoar heurísticas para o discurso das notícias por meio do desenvolvimento de um modelo cognitivo de abstração, em contextos de mídia social. Para tal, discute-se a notícia como gênero, estrutura e metalinguagem, partindo da noção formal de modo semiótico. A anotação sob essa visada é uma tecnologia bem-sucedida para controlar os efeitos das restrições de gênero, revelar relações e inquirir sobre dados e documentos. Procede-se à anotação da notícia na interface do Twitter, caracterizada em (...) termos de suas regularidades formais e materiais empregadas recursivamente. Demonstra-se a formalização de uma semântica para o discurso da notícia nas chamadas formas lógicas, adaptada de ferramentas desenvolvidas pela Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT), a fim de construir novas hipóteses sobre coerência em diferentes níveis de detalhe. Por fim, discute-se a implicação desta abordagem como disciplina na produção de conhecimento transversal com vistas à literacia digital, em tempos urgentes1. (shrink)

Modern tendencies of genre formatting in printed media in Russia are analyzed in the article. A number of printed periodicals are investigated, namely “Ekonomika i zhizn’”, “Vedomosti”, “Schastlivye roditeli” (more than 1200 texts) and 5 regional Moscow newspapers (“Kolomenskaya Pravda”, “Zarya”, “Orekhovo-Zuevskaya Pravda”, “Serebryanoprudsky Vestnik”, “Khimkinskie Novosti”) comprising more than 400 texts. The author states that formatting of modern printed media and formatting of the used genres occur within the main tendencies of journalism development. They are PR, Westernization, glamorization (...) and usage of Western journalism patterns. It leads to distribution of new text types, such as an advertising article, an ordered article, an image and supporting articles. Some changes in the process of genre formatting in Russia are determined: traditional genre forms characteristic for Russia are reduced and hybrid genres appear instead whereas journalism genres mutate and Western ones are widely applied. This results in news reports as the most popular genres whereas high quality analytical and art-journalistic genres are reduced. (shrink)

By and large, contemporary news stories are stories about a particular nation, told to an audience that is seen and addressed in national terms. However, the understanding of the exact ways in which national imagination becomes engrained in the narrative conventions of news reporting is still rather limited, in particular when it comes to audiovisual genres. This article aims to fill a part of this blank by examining the links between national imagination and the narrative conventions of (...) television news. Building on existing debates about different modes of news reporting, the article distinguishes two distinct sets of narrative conventions at work in television news: one typically found in routine reporting, the other characteristic of crisis and celebratory reporting. It is argued that each of these two sets of conventions is tied to a different form of nationalism, and normally arises in a different political climate. Links between national imagination and narrative conventions vary accordingly. To demonstrate this, the article provides a comparative analysis of narrative structures in selected samples of television news bulletins broadcast in the early 1990s in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The concluding section reflects on the external validity of the chosen case study and surveys supportive evidence from four other relevant cases, drawn from the UK and Israel. (shrink)

This study examines the potential of fake news to produce effects on social media engagement as well as the moderating role of education and government approval. We report on a 2x2x2 online experiment conducted in Romania (N=813), in which we manipulated the level of facticity of a news story, its valence, and intention to deceive. Results show that ideologically driven news with a negative valence (rather than fabricated news or other genres, such as satire and (...) parody) have a greater virality potential. However, neither the level of education nor government approval moderate this effect. Additionally, both positive and negative ideologically driven news stories enhance the probability that people will sign a document to support the government (i. e., potential for political engagement on social media). These latter effects are moderated by government approval: Lower levels of government approval lead to less support for the government on social media, as a consequence of fake news exposure. (shrink)

Genre analysis has been applied to a sizable body of linguistic studies on various text types. However, little attention has been paid to advertorials as an emerging hybridized genre. To identify the generic and linguistic characteristics of advertorials, and therefore to classify advertorials into an appropriate genre, this study carries out a comprehensive genre analysis of advertorials based on Bhatia’s seven-step genre analysis methodology. A corpus of 55 advertorials was collected from four English-language magazines and two English-language newspapers, from which (...) a sub-corpus of 12 samples was further selected for a thorough examination of linguistic characteristics. Attempting to gain a comprehensive view of generic features of advertorials, this study makes a critical comparison of advertorials with three inextricably related genres: advertisements, news stories and editorials. Linguistic evidence sufficiently demonstrates that advertorials share fundamental generic and linguistic natures with advertisements and proposes classifying advertorials as a sub-genre of advertisements. (shrink)

Mainstream news broadcasting pursues an authentication project, to bolster its claims to serious, weighty and factual news reporting. News review contributes to this project when it seeks to humanize front-stage news personnel. It moves away from the traditional, institutionalized concern with `authenticity-from-above' and works to generate `authenticity-from-below'. As an extreme instance of resistance to the `from-above' formulation, this article considers data from a televised UK weekday morning show, The Big Breakfast, and specifically its `review of the (...) papers' slot. The show's orientation is iconoclastic, from the establishment perspective on news, partly by its high degree of reflexivity about the television medium. Its main presenter, Johnny Vaughan, extrapolates from newsprint sources well beyond the conventional bounds of the review genre. He delivers a thoroughly performed, burlesque response to more and less trivial aspects of the day's print news. His stylized vocal and visual representations of figures in the news achieve a populist moral consensus, as a key process in constructing a `from-below' authenticity. Even in this thoroughly tabloidized and comic performance, the show retains a clear critical dimension, strikingly at odds with authorized modes of news and news review. (shrink)

Satirical news is often characterized as a hybrid genre that consists of three important communicative functions: it is (1) humoristic, (2) informative, and (3) evaluative. The Humoristic Metaphors in Satirical News (HMSN) typology demonstrates that metaphors can be utilized by satirists to express this hybridity by consisting of a combination of one or more of satire’s core communicative functions. Nevertheless, the underlying principles through which metaphors are capable of humorously explaining and/or criticizing current affairs are less clear. To (...) broaden our understanding of how metaphorical humor is used in satirical news to fulfill these functions, we integrate the HMSN typology with the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH). The GTVH assumes that all verbal humor must draw from six interdependent Knowledge Resources (KRs). Through a content analysis of metaphorical humor used across various American satirical news shows, we investigated how these KRs are used to fulfill satire’s core communicative functions across the various metaphorical sub-types of the HSMN typology. We found that: (1) some KRs can help fulfill the communicative function(s) of metaphorical jokes, while (2) some KRs constrain the options available for the expression of certain communicative function(s) or other KRs. (shrink)

This study examines the linguistic construal and cognitive representation of time and viewpoint in the genre of news narratives. We present a model of mental spaces that involves a News Space in which the deictic center is construed of the news actors at the time the newsworthy events took place, and a Reality Space in which the deictic here-and-now center of journalist and reader is construed. This model explains how the dynamic representation of narrative news discourse, (...) characterized by shifts in time and viewpoint, is steered by linguistic devices. An analysis of Dutch news narratives shows that temporal adverbs such as yesterdayand shifts from present tense to past tense may signal a moveforwardin narrative time, to a viewpoint in the future relative to the narrative now-point, rather thanbackward. These atypical time shifts can be accounted for by presupposing an Intermediate Space located at a point in time between the News Space and the Reality Space where the progression of narrative time comes to a halt and experiences are rather relived than reported. The salience of the Intermediate Space may be signaled by quotative conditionals reflecting the viewpoints of implicitly quoted sources. These results clarify how tense and temporal deixis steer the linguistic construal of time and viewpoint in news narratives, demonstrating that time and viewpoint are closely linked in the cognitive representation of these narratives. (shrink)

This study examines the linguistic construal and cognitive representation of time and viewpoint in the genre of news narratives. We present a model of mental spaces that involves a News Space in which the deictic center is construed of the news actors at the time the newsworthy events took place, and a Reality Space in which the deictic here-and-now center of journalist and reader is construed. This model explains how the dynamic representation of narrative news discourse, (...) characterized by shifts in time and viewpoint, is steered by linguistic devices. An analysis of Dutch news narratives shows that temporal adverbs such as yesterdayand shifts from present tense to past tense may signal a moveforwardin narrative time, to a viewpoint in the future relative to the narrative now-point, rather thanbackward. These atypical time shifts can be accounted for by presupposing an Intermediate Space located at a point in time between the News Space and the Reality Space where the progression of narrative time comes to a halt and experiences are rather relived than reported. The salience of the Intermediate Space may be signaled by quotative conditionals reflecting the viewpoints of implicitly quoted sources. These results clarify how tense and temporal deixis steer the linguistic construal of time and viewpoint in news narratives, demonstrating that time and viewpoint are closely linked in the cognitive representation of these narratives. (shrink)

This article examines a recent shift in the organization of prime-time news on Greek private television, from the `one-way' dissemination of information to an interactive format, where the news genre meets the talk show. By drawing on Hunston's model of evaluation in written academic discourse, it is argued that this conversational news format serves as a vehicle for evaluation, allowing the anchorpersons and journalist panels more freedom to voice concrete views. More specifically, prime-time news is generally (...) cast in terms of two major sub-genres, namely the debate and the structured panel discussion. These sub-genres particularly lend themselves to the performance of acts of evaluation by TV journalists. Far from merely reporting events, journalists unequivocally show that their main task is to jointly interpret reality on behalf of the viewer audience. They set about this task by explicitly encoding their personal attitudes, while directly challenging government spokespersons and policies. It is argued that, in so doing, media personalities in effect shape audience opinions. The data attest to the increasing empowerment of the Greek media, and illustrate the ways in which conversational processes bring into being the continuously evolving public sphere in contemporary Greece. (shrink)

This work investigates the influence of geo-cultural proximity and exposure to news and crime-action drama on the cultivation effect. A content analysis of prime-time programming was used to compose questions about the prevalence of policemen, lawyers, and salesmen in the USA and Israel. A sample of 655 students answered the questions. Viewing of American programming is significantly correlated with a tendency to hold a biased estimation of the prevalence of all three occupations in America in a manner that resembles (...) the world of TV content. Viewing of Israeli programs has no such impact. Viewing of news and crime-action drama and general viewing have no systematic influence on the estimations made about any of the countries. (shrink)

Over the last few years there seems to have been a sharp increase in the number of books that want to spread the news that economics is, or at least can be, fun. This paper sets out to explain in what senses economics is supposed to be fun. In particular, the books in what I will call the economics-made-fun genre will be compared first with papers and books written by economists with the explicit intent of making fun of economics. (...) Subsequently, it will be examined whether or not it makes sense to accuse books in the economics-made-fun genre of economics imperialism, as some commentators have recently done. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to analyse environmental reporting in the Australian broadsheet newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald. The focus is on a particular kind of new, multisemiotic news story genre that appears regularly in this newspaper, and that makes use of word-image play. Using a social semiotic framework and employing Appraisal theory, we analyse a corpus of 40 stories in terms of evaluative meanings in heading, image and caption, and interpret the significance of our findings in terms (...) of both Critical Discourse Analysis and Positive Discourse Analysis. In particular, we question whether the playing with environmental stories in the news, and the resulting clash between the humorousness of the play and the seriousness of the reported environmental event, is good or bad practice. With its multisemiotic focus, this article aims to make a significant and innovative contribution to the emerging field of ecolinguistics, and the development of Appraisal theory. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the status of argumentative discourse. We argue that argumentation can contribute to instances of different discourse genres, regardless of whether it is functional to their purposes. By analyzing examples from the daily press in the light of an approach to discourse analysis inspired by pragmatics, we show that also texts that are not expected to be argumentative have underlying argumentative structures and that a text’s being argumentative is a matter of degree: (...) the understanding of underlying argumentative structures contributes to a varying extent to the understanding of what a text as a whole means and of its point in the speech situation. This role of argumentative structures in text understanding suggests considering argumentation as a cognitively-based dimension of discourse, connected to human rationality. (shrink)

In 2004 The New York Times launched a weekly Times Supplement with Taiwan’s United Daily News. This article aims to explore non-lexicalized allusion variation between TS headlines and NYT headlines as a discourse strategy. A textual survey was conducted on a corpus comprising 605 TS news articles and their corresponding NYT articles. Non-lexicalized allusions were identified and explored within a reader-oriented approach. And a stylistic analysis was performed to explore cognitive, pragmatic, and rhetorical roles of non-lexicalized allusions in (...) the corpus. The results show that non-lexicalized allusions occur in far fewer TS than NYT headlines. The allusion downsizing increases the accessibility of TS headlines to general TS readers at the cost of cultural diverseness and stylistic expressiveness in the headline language, making the language of TS headlines stylistically more restricted and culturally less Western. NYT headline language exemplifies English as a native language, whereas TS headline language is a specific genre of English as an international language. This article also discusses cultural implications of non-lexicalized allusions for EIL learning. It is pointed out that EIL is an integration of elements of all varieties of English involved in international or intercultural discourse. The cultural knowledge behind non-lexicalized allusions dealt with in this article represents one such element of EIL. (shrink)

Resumen: Este trabajo ofrece evidencia empírica a la premisa que sostiene que el acercamiento teórico y metodológico de la Lingüística al estudio de géneros del ámbito profesional, no ha tenido el mismo énfasis que el académico (Cassany y López, 2011; Montolío & López, 2010; Autor, 2016; Lillis, 2021). En este sentido, el objetivo de esta investigación fue describir el estudio de los géneros profesionales entre 2008 y 2017 en las 10 principales revistas de Lingüística en América Latina. Para ello se (...) utilizó un enfoque mixto en un corpus de 1.729 publicaciones. Los resultados indican que solo el 1,85% de los estudios abordan géneros profesionales, principalmente, acerca de Artículos de Investigación Científica (36,3%), Sentencias Judiciales (27,2%) y Noticias (18,1%), lo que evidencia un reto pendiente que tiene hasta hoy la Lingüística. Abstract: This paper provides empirical evidence to the premise that the theoretical and methodological approach of Linguistics to the study of genres of the professional field has not had the same emphasis as the academics ones (Cassany & López, 2011; Montolío & López, 2010; Author, 2006, Lillis, 2021). In this sense, the objective of this research was to describe the study of professional genres between 2008 and 2017 in the 10 leading journals of Linguistics in Latin America. For this, a mixed approach was used in a corpus of 1,729 publications. The results indicate that only 1.85% of the researchs analizes professional genres, mainly about Articles of Scientific Research (36.3%), Judicial Sentences (27.2%) and News (18.1%), which evidences a pending challenge in Linguistics. (shrink)

The analysis of TV violence cannot be limited to the quantification of its incidence, but should also take into account the type of violence broadcast and its context (what is depicted and how). Thus, normative models of violence (legitimized violence with positive consequences for the aggressor, or vice versa) could be understood as positive, while contra-normative models of violence (rewarding illegitimate violence and punishing legitimate violence) should be of far greater concern. This paper analyzes the normative contexts of TV violence (...) through a content analysis of randomly selected fragments of TV programming (147 recorded hours). The results show that news programs and TV series/soaps delegitimized violence to a higher extent, while films tend to show legitimized or ambivalent violence. Positive consequences of violence predominate in fictional programs, except for TV series/soaps. Normative presentation of violence is more frequent, especially in nonfiction genres, as fiction has more freedom to depict the socially undesirable. (shrink)

The particle internal clock conjectured by de Broglie in 1924 was investigated in a channeling experiment using a beam of ∼80 MeV electrons aligned along the 〈110〉 direction of a 1 μm thick silicon crystal. Some of the electrons undergo a rosette motion, in which they interact with a single atomic row. When the electron energy is finely varied, the rate of electron transmission at 0° shows a 8% dip within 0.5% of the resonance energy, 80.874 MeV, for which the (...) frequency of atomic collisions matches the electron’s internal clock frequency. A model is presented to show the compatibility of our data with the de Broglie hypothesis. (shrink)

This article explores the nature of argumentative interaction in the hybrid political interview: a broadcast news genre whose discourse positions the journalist not just as investigator but as socio-political advocate. Such interviews offer explicit challenges to the traditionally conceived ‘neutral’ role of the broadcast news journalist. Interviewer ‘non-neutrality’ is examined in contexts where the speech exchange system shifts into the unmitigated and aggravated opposition characteristic of argument. Drawing on a sample of interviews involving different hosts, I analyse the (...) structural features of both interviewer and interviewee turns that occur in these environments. I do this in relation both to sequential matters — that is, the types of turns taken and their relations with other turns in their immediate environment — and to matters of the substantive content of utterances — that is, what speakers are saying and/or the way they are saying it. (shrink)

This article investigates how talk show interviews are brought to an end. The closing process of televised talk shows is analysed and compared with Clayman's characterization of news interview closings. The study concludes that closings in both genres share features relating to the structural organization and the participants' behaviour which can be accounted for in terms of the institutional context in which the speech events take place. Nevertheless, the particular closing structure of each type of institutionally situated talk, (...) as well as its content and style, is genre-specific and shaped by the specific goal pursued in each speech event and by the relationship between the parties to the encounter. Thus, unlike news interviews, the entertainment purpose of talk show interviews ultimately justifies the complexity of the closing structure, its interpersonal content and informal style. The presence of a studio audience also influences the closing format. (shrink)

This study investigated cross-cultural differences in individual pride and collective pride between Chinese and Americans using data from text corpora. We found higher absolute frequencies of pride items in the American corpus than in the Chinese corpus. Cross-cultural differences were found for relative frequencies of different types of pride, and some of them depended on the genre of the text corpora. For both blogs and news genres, Americans showed higher frequencies of individual pride items and lower frequencies of (...) relational pride items than did their Chinese counterparts. Cross-cultural differences in national pride, however, depended on the genre: Chinese news genre included more national pride items than its American counterpart, but the opposite was true for the blog genre. We discuss the implications of these results in relation to the existing literature on cultural differences in individual pride and collective pride. (shrink)

Within the genres of news and current affairs television, it is the generic logic of the ‘feelgood’ genre of the talk show that legitimizes personalized discourse between famous hosts and politicians. The article presents a case study of such an interview, focusing on the ways in which the interaction between the verbal, the visual and the rhythmic modalities of the interview is employed by the multiple authors of the text to construct a variety of interpersonal footings for interviewer (...) and interviewee on the one hand and a series of preferred interpretations for the audience on the other. The method is deviant case analysis, using tools from semantics and pragmatics, discourse and conversation analysis, and visual analysis of news images. To explore the manner of interaction between the verbal and visual channel, the concept of rhythm is developed for dialogic audiovisual texts. Dialogic audiovisual rhythm is defined as arising from the interaction of speaker or addressee change with onset of new shot, and with frequency of shots per turn/ generic unit of the interview. Rhythmic sequences can then be segmented which make up the textual structure of the interview, delineating its semantic units and areas of strategic positioning between the private, the personal and the political. Three types of the personalization of politics can be discerned in the text: that of the private domain, that of political relations as private ones, and that of politics as history being made by great men. A forth type of personalization is that of the relations between the media and politics. Different combinations of verbal, visual and rhythmic means are used to realize these types discursively. (shrink)

As a journalistic genre, reportage is determined by the context in which it is pro­duced but, unlike news, it does not depend on current events. For this reason, the reporter is not obliged to be brief and has a vocation for style. This is the case of Ryszard Kapuściński (Pińsk, 1932-Warsaw, 2007), who was the correspondent of the communist-era Polish Press Agency in Latin America between 1967 and 1972, when the Latin American literary boom was at its peak. After (...) this experience, the reporter returned several times to the New Continent. What if the main Latin American influence on Kapuściński was actually the style, exploring a new genre, the so-called Magical Journalism? (shrink)

By presenting a case study based on the argumentative analysis of news in the press, this article introduces and discusses strategic manoeuvring with contextual frames. Drawing on the linguistic notion of frame, I introduce the concept of contextual frame to refer to the news context, that is, the background against which a certain event is presented as a piece of news. I argue that newspapers and journalists make use of contextual frames in the apparently neutral genre of (...) news reporting to propose specific interpretations of the facts at issue, which become the basis for explicit comments and editorials. To show how this works, I investigate in detail a case of newspaper coverage of a complex episode using the pragma-dialectical notion of strategic manoeuvring and the Argumentum Model of Topics to analyse argument schemes. I show that, in the use of contextual frames, there is a prominent relation between presentational devices and topical potential; contextual frames provide the implicit material premises which are at the basis of argumentations through which newspapers interpret and comment on the news. (shrink)

Science fiction has been an inexhaustible source for the creation of technoscientific imaginary that has marked certain historical periods and influenced the production of subjectivity. This imaginary evokes complex ontological, epistemological, political, social, environmental and existential questions on the present and the future. The aim of this study was to identify and characterize the cultural productions accessed by the public to form an opinion about the genetic manipulation of human beings. A survey about sources of information that influence opinions on (...) the genetic manipulation of human beings was applied to 360 medical students (70.8% female). Movies were the most commonly mentioned source of information, followed by books, documentaries, news programs, television series, informational videos, soap operas and videogames. Science fiction was the most frequent genre and dystopian views of the future of humanity predominated. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ArtistsJennifer and Kevin McCoy are Brooklyn-based artists who make projects about how our thoughts, experiences, and memories are structured through genre and repetition. In order to focus attention on these structures, they often reexamine classic works of science fiction or television narrative, creating sculptural objects, video projections, or live events from what they find.Their work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, (...) The New Museum (all in New York), and The Renaissance Society (Chicago). International exhibitions include projects at ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany) and Kunst Werke (Berlin), and a solo exhibition at The British Film Institute (London, UK). Articles about their work have appeared in Art News, Art in America, Artforum, Flash Art, The Wire, dArt International, Spin Magazine, Feed, and The Independent. Installation view and detail images of Double Fantasy 2 (Sex) were shown in the solo exhibition "Directed Dreaming" at Postmasters, New York, March–April 2006. The Double Fantasy image was part of the exhibition "Night Sites" at the Hannover Kunstverein in Hannover Germany, November 2005. Each side of the sculpture has a model of a childhood sex fantasy for each of us. Cameras project large-scale images of it onto the wall, accompanied by a soundtrack. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy 2 (Sex). "Directed Dreaming," installation view. March–April 2006 at Postmasters Gallery, New York(Cover) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy 2 (Sex). "Directed Dreaming," installation view. March–April 2006 at Postmasters Gallery, New York(Page 2) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 3.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy 2 (Sex). "Directed Dreaming," detail. March–April 2006 at Postmasters Gallery, New York(Page 16) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 4.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy 2 (Sex). "Directed Dreaming," detail. March–April 2006 at Postmasters Gallery, New York(Page 32) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 5.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy 2 (Sex). "Directed Dreaming," installation view. March–April 2006 at Postmasters Gallery, New York(Page 47) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 6.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy 2 (Sex). "Directed Dreaming," installation view. March–April 2006 at Postmasters Gallery, New York(Page 63) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 7.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy 2 (Sex). "Directed Dreaming," installation view. March–April 2006 at Postmasters Gallery, New York(Page 77) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 8.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy 2 (Sex). "Directed Dreaming," detail. March–April 2006 at Postmasters Gallery, New York(Page 92) Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 9.Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Double Fantasy. "Night Sites," installation view. November 2005 at Hannover Kunstverein, Hannover, Germany(Page 107)Copyright © 2007 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In recent years, a lot of academic attention has been paid to the public discussion on ‘Black Pete’ (Zwarte Piet) in the Low Countries. Black Pete is a much-debated blackface character which is part of the Saint-Nicholas tradition – a yearly festive event taking place at the beginning of December associated with gifts and celebration. ‘Tradition’ versus ‘racism’ seem to be the main arguments in the debate. The current study analyses the debate as it evolved in Flanders from 2012 until (...) 2022, applying Critical Discourse Analysis to find out how the thinking about the event and the Black Pete character, as reflected in the newspapers, changed over a decade. Our sample consists of 143 articles from the four most read newspapers in Flanders (De Standaard, De Morgen, Het Laatste Nieuws, Het Nieuwsblad). All journalistic genres were included, news reports as well as opinion articles, but also readers’ letters. Based on an analysis of naming, modality and evidentiality (Fairclough [2013]. Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language. Routledge; Halliday [1994]. An introduction to functional grammar. Arnold), we illustrate and demonstrate how the tone of the debate gradually changed from a discourse of conflict into a discourse of moderation and appeasement. (shrink)

Now that it has become so commonplace, we rarely blink an eye at camera footage framed by the crosshairs of a sniper’s gun or from the perspective of a descending smart bomb. But how did this weaponized gaze become the norm for depicting war, and how has it influenced public perceptions? _Through the Crosshairs _traces the genealogy of this weapon’s-eye view across a wide range of genres, including news reports, military public relations images, action movies, video games, and (...) social media posts. As he tracks how gun-camera footage has spilled from the battlefield onto the screens of everyday civilian life, Roger Stahl exposes how this raw video is carefully curated and edited to promote identification with military weaponry, rather than with the targeted victims. He reveals how the weaponized gaze is not only a powerful propagandistic frame, but also a prime site of struggle over the representation of state violence. (shrink)

This article is a study of the survival of scribal culture in nineteenth-century Spain in the form of the so-called ‘memory books’ (libros de memorias). I analyse their relationship with the educational developments of the period, as well as the material characteristics and the content of these texts, in order to define their typical features. These texts were the products of hybrid writing practices, in the sense that several elements were frequently superimposed on one another: economic news, personal, family (...) and social events and even historical details. Hence the similarity between the memory books and other genres such as account books (libros de cuentas) and family books (libros de familia). Lastly, I will examine some nineteenth-century examples as epigones of a writing genre which had its origins in the later Middle Ages and Early Modern period. “One morning, while tidying up the bedroom, Rosa opened the drawer in the trunk where Cholo kept his papers. There she found the papers about the property and, in a corner, together with the Family Book and the social security booklet, the papers from the bank […]. And she was about to put it away when it occurred to her to take off the elastic band around the big folder which Cholo had kept from his time in Switzerland. There were things, names and so on that she didn’t understand, but in the middle there were also some of the cards she had sent from Aran.”1. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 177 Amsterdam, appears in the series of the International Archives of the History of Ideas, published under the direction of P. Dibon of Nijmegen and R. Popkin of the University of California at San Diego and a distinguished international editorial committee. Other volumes demonstrate the philosophical respectability of the collection: three on Descartes and Cartesianism, one on Berkeley's immaterialism, three on Pierre Bayle, the rest on philosophical (...) topics from the Renaissance to the 19th century. In this gallery, these letters by a not very good French poet---who was yet an acute and rather individualistic judge of men and books, already one of the arbiters of intellectual and artistic life in France--may seem a little out of place. Yet, to many historians of intellectual affairs, the firm establishment of dates and personal relationships is a matter of much importance, and documents such as these, largely devoted as they are to the communication of news about books and writers, the activities of rulers and ambassadors, printers and curious travelers, can be a substantial aid in determining the structure of an historical moment, the succession and interrelationship of events. One is willing to grant that much of what Chapelain wrote to Heinsius is trivial and concerns books and literary news of slight importance, that a delicate irony makes less of some of his comments than they were worth at the time. The triviality itself is a clue to the temper of Paris during the Fronde and in the late years of the regency of Mazarin. Great ideas were not being discussed in public when Pascal was writing his Pensdes; the irony is a mode of defense against involvement, and fashionable at the time. Bray's elaborate introduction is more concerned with the artistic and subjective aspect of the letters than with their contribution to intellectual history. In about a hundred pages, he discusses his author's method of writing, the genre which this kind of letter represents, the artistry it exhibits, from basic structure to stylistic ornamentation, and finally the human and even ethical implications of this collection. His notes are full and informative; identifications are well documented and cross-referencing in the notes and in the index of names make the volume a usable source of information, even though it cannot be recommended as stimulating debate or lively narrative. The topics discussed by Chapelain range over a considerable area, without becoming controversial. There is one exceptional letter in which he instructs Heinsius in adapting his integrity to the role of a diplomat; he must acquire "un peu de dissimulation" to oppose to "l'ing~nuit~ du Parnasse." There are references to civil strife, to foreign affairs, to the rivalry of Dutch and English navies, to the sympathy of the French for the Swedish Lutheran dynasty as opposed to the Catholic ttapsburgs and the ecclesiastical electors of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier. Queen Christina of Sweden plays a continually less attractive part as the letters proceed to their end; and Christiaan Huygens, the Duc de Montausier, Ismael Boulliau, Guez de Balzac, and Gilles M4nage figure more or less regularly in these pages. Of philosophers there is little mention, and of discussion of ideas for their own sake still less. The letters are, like many another collection deriving from the age before the learned and scientific journals, a source of valuable information about certain persons and certain books; they are hardly a serious contribution to the history of ideas. H~covaT BROWN Brown University Pascal. By J. H. Broome. (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1966. pp. x + 250. $6.00.) The most remarkable feature of this work is that it locates and forcefully interprets philosophical themes common to all of Pascal's widely=diversified writing. In his works on the vacuum, the computer, geometry, hydrostatics, Grace, freedom and the art of persuasion as well as the Pens~es, Broome locates five regular features of Pascal's thought: 1) the three orders (pp. 103-4, inter alia); 2) the deux infinis (p. 146); 3) a theory of knowl- 178 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY edge; 4) a dialecticalmethod; and 5) a theory of communication. The former two themes are commonly discussed by students of... (shrink)

The present research study carries out a contrastive analysis between two corpora of legal opinion columns as special types of genres, with a view to assess their opposing patterns of impersonality—authorial detachment—and attitude—emotion, judgment, appreciation, taking as a point of departure appraisal theory, or the interpretation of Halliday's Systemic-Functional Linguistics by the so-called Sydney School. The long-established perspective is that legal genres are highly impersonal; authoritative instruments representing an intentional exercise of elitist and exclusionary practices. However, the hypothesis (...) embedded in the present study is that some texts, such as news editorials and op-eds, constitute hybrid genres where the writer makes use of all kinds of inducement devices to support his/her theses with effectiveness and credibility, nonetheless retaining one of the basic traits of monogloss legal discourse: impersonality. However, it is hypothesized that this hybridity is to take place in different degrees, in tune with the influence exerted by legal system that constitutes the background of each corpus. To prove such a point, 40 legal op-eds—roughly, a thirty-five-thousand-word corpus in English and Spanish overall—were scrutinized, having been extracted from the specialized legal sections of two national newspapers of undisputed prestige as opinion-formation media. Through a contrastive study, the purpose of the present work was set to describe, explain and assess how lexicogrammar devices unveil interesting differences between the expression of impersonality and attitude in legal opinion columns as genres in either language, hence reflecting different ways in which the law is envisioned in each of the particular legal systems they belong to. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Rhetoric of Parody in Plato's MenexenusFranco V. TrivignoIn Plato's Menexenus, Socrates spends nearly the entire dialogue reciting an epitaphios logos, or funeral oration, that he claims was taught to him by Aspasia, Pericles' mistress. Three difficulties confront the interpreter of this dialogue. First, commentators have puzzled over how to understand the intention of Socrates' funeral oration (see Clavaud 1980, 17–77).1 Some insist that it is parodic, performing an (...) essentially critical function (e.g., Loraux 1986); while others claim that it is serious, in particular as an expression of Plato's political ideal (e.g., Kahn 1963).2 Adherents on both sides seem to think that the options are mutually exclusive.3 Second, commentators have had difficulty understanding why Plato would have Socrates attribute his entire oration to Aspasia (e.g., Coventry 1989, 3; Pownall 2004, 60). Most agree that this move is ironic and that it has something to do with the alleged target of the dialogue's criticism. But scholars have differed over whether the Aspasia reference is meant to implicate Pericles' funeral oration (Monoson 1998), rhetoric in general (Pownall 2004), Athens (Loraux 1986), or even Aeschines (Clavaud 1980).4 Third, scholars have struggled to make sense of the dialogue's "deliberate and fantastic anachronism" (Dodds 1990, 24). In the funeral oration, Socrates relates the history of Athens up to the King's Peace in 386 B.C., a full thirteen years after he has died. This problem has generated the least consensus, with some scholars restricting their analysis [End Page 29] to dating considerations (e.g., Dodds 1990) and at least one speculating that Socrates speaks in this dialogue as a ghost (Rosenstock 1994).5It is the contention of this article that, by understanding the rhetoric of parody in the Menexenus, one can resolve these difficulties and come to a coherent and unified understanding of the philosophical intentions of the dialogue.6 More specifically, I will show that the anachronism is a consequence of a particular parodic strategy, that of amplification; that the dialogue's parody targets not only Pericles' funeral oration in particular but funeral oratory, rhetoric, and Athens as well; and that the parody has serious philosophical implications.7 Further, I claim that the serious philosophical content is both critical and constructive. Plato subverts the civic identity and understanding of virtue encouraged by the genre of funeral oration, and he challenges its praise-based model of political discourse. At the same time, Plato's parodic criticism is not entirely negative, for it relies on alternative paradigms of civic identity, virtue, and political discourse.I. The Rhetoric of ParodyBefore turning to the Menexenus itself, I want to clarify what I mean by parody. For a working definition, I suggest that parody is "an imitation that distorts a target text, author, or genre."8 In order to make some general observations about the rhetoric of parody, I will look briefly at an exemplar of parody from Aristophanes' Frogs. I do so for three reasons: to display two strategies of parodic distortion, to show that parody can have multiple targets, and to argue that parody can have both serious and complex intentions.9In the Frogs (1331–63), Aristophanes uses at least two techniques of parodic distortion, inversion and amplification, in his extended parody of Euripides' monodies or single-actor odes.10 Parodic inversion, broadly speaking, upsets or overturns the target text by distorting the original in a way that reverses the stylistic effect or semantic intention. Parodic amplification hones in on one aspect of the target text and amplifies it to absurdity, often exposing its artificiality as a literary trope.The parodic scene features a woman who awakens, hysterical and terrified, from a god-sent dream, which has conveyed disturbing news. We find in this passage a particular kind of parodic inversion: bathos, the unexpected introduction of the vulgar, ordinary, or mundane, which undermines an otherwise somber tone.11 Consider the following excerpt:Attendants, set alight a lamp for me,Collect the dew of rivers in pitchers [End Page 30] And heat the water,So that I may wash away the god-sent dream.Oh god of the sea... (shrink)

This study proposes a multimodal fusion model to account for the cognitive mechanisms involving 56 political cartoons with regard to U.S. beef import issues as reported in two dominant Taiwanese newspapers, the Liberty Times and United Daily News. Specifically, this study claims that multimodal fusion model evolves from two metonymic-metaphoric networks, i.e., related metonymic network and diversified metaphoric network, and combines the conceptual, visual, and verbal modes. Our analysis demonstrates that multimodal fusion is a significant and recurrent representation technique (...) in the genre of political cartoon and has the cognitive function of encapsulating the abstract complex political debates efficiently with irony and humorous effect. Furthermore, our analysis shows the important role of metonymy and demonstrates how metonymies and metaphors are interwoven in the process of multimodal fusion, which underlies the metaphorical mappings of conceptual scenarios related to “POLITICS IS.. (shrink)

This article proposes a typology of the epistemology of live blogging through an analysis of two live news blogs: Radio New Zealand News’ live blog of a significant earthquake in Aotearoa New Zealand in November 2016 and BBC News’ live blog of the Brexit referendum result in June 2016. We use these cases to draw out five features of the genre that we suggest may characterise other live news blogs. We demonstrate that these blogs tend to (...) produce a fragmentary narrative that reflects particular moments in time, curate an array of textual objects from a range of information sources to produce ‘networked balance’, gain coherence from an often informal authorial voice or voices and generate claims to knowledge of events which are simultaneously dynamic and fragile. This typology contributes to understanding journalism’s position within networked information spaces. (shrink)

Despite the fact that radio documentaries broadcast mainly strong emotions, news values of this genre are also its essential feature. Therefore, it is necessary to describe the potential of such works to deliver knowledge about the transcendent world, which could be significant for the listeners. The aim of this article is to show theses made by scholars as regards radio documentaries. Researchers’ analyses are related to the genre’s potential possibilities of to broaden people’s minds and influence the recipient’s perception.

This volume provides an innovative approach to the referential process thanks to its focus on the relationship between conventions and discourse pragmatics. It brings together a cross-section of current research on referential conventions and pragmatic strategies, in a number of different fields (formal and theoretical linguistics, semantics, discourse analysis, psycholinguistics, interactional linguistics, natural language processing), in a variety of verbal and non-verbal languages (English, German, different varieties of French, Indonesian, Belgian sign language) and in a diversity of contexts (the coining (...) of names, language acquisition, second language learning, and various genres such as news articles, narratives, satire or game playing). The volume is meant as a series of thought-provoking studies which place speakers and addressees at the core of the referential act, thus providing evidence on how they negotiate and adjust, depending on the context. (shrink)

In this issue we include contributions from the individuals presiding at the panel All in a Jurnal's Work: A BABEL Wayzgoose, convened at the second Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group. Sadly, the contributions of Daniel Remein, chief rogue at the Organism for Poetic Research as well as editor at Whiskey & Fox , were not able to appear in this version of the proceedings. From the program : 2ND BIENNUAL MEETING OF THE BABEL WORKING GROUP CONFERENCE “CRUISING IN (...) THE RUINS: THE QUESTION OF DISCIPLINARITY IN THE POST/MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY” SEPTEMBER 21ST, 2012: SESSION 13 MCLEOD C.322, CURRY STUDENT CENTER NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY, BOSTON, MA. Traditionally, a wayzgoose was a celebration at the end of a printer’s year, a night off in the late fall before the work began of printing by candlelight. According to the OED, the Master Printer would make for the journeymen “a good Feast, and not only entertains them at his own House, but besides, gives them Money to spend at the Ale-house or Tavern at Night.” Following in this line, continent. proposes in its publication(s) a night out and a good Feast, away from the noxious fumes of the Academy and into a night of revelry which begins, but does not end, at the alehouse or Tavern. continent. proposes that the thinking of the Academy be freed to be thought elsewhere, in the alleys and doorways of the village and cities, encountered not in the strictly defined spaces of the classroom and blackboard (now white) but anticipated and found where thinking occurs. Historically, academic journals have served a different purpose than the Academy itself. Journals (from the Anglo-Fr. jurnal , "a day," from O.Fr. jornel , "day, time; day's work," hence the journalist as writer of the news of the day ) have served as privileged sites for the articulation and concretization of specific modes of knowledge and control (insemination of those ideas has been formalized in the classroom, in seminar). In contrast, the academic journal is post-partum and has been an old-boys club, an insider trading network in which truths are (re)circulated against themselves, forming a Maginot Line against whatever is new, or the distinctly challenging. All in a Jurnal’s Work will discuss (in part) the ramifications of cheap start-up publications that are challenging the traditional ensconced-in-ivory academic journals and their supporting infrastructures. The panel will be seeking a questioning (as a challenging) towards the discipline of knowledge production/fabrication (of truth[s]) and the event of the Academy (and its publications) as it has evolved and continues to (d)evolve. Issues to be discussed will revolve around the power of academic publishing and its origins, hierarchical versus horizontal academic modules (is there a place for the General Assembly in academia?) and the evolving idea of the Multiversity as a site(s) of a (BABELing) multivocality in the wake of the University of Disaster. STAGE NOTES AND/AS/OR TRACK CHANGES: INTRODUCTORY REMARKS AND MAGICAL THINKING ON PRINTING: AN ELECTION AND A PROVOCATION Isaac Linder “Of course most people don’t think of editing/publishing as theatre but as something boring or parasitical (vis-à-vis a ‘source’ text), a textual backwater populated by people with glasses. But I think publishing a book today is theatre, socially networked theatre…. Facebook and Flickr are our era’s administered and generic version of sixties happenings!” — Tan Lin 1 ELECTING A MASCOT: THE BARNACLE GOOSE After pitching the idea for this panel with the editorial help of my continental cohorts I became fascinated with the image of the goose—dead and roasted as it may be—and its relationship to the space of the printing press. For a long while after proposing this gathering I was seriously under the sway of delusions of grandeur, imagining that we might roast a goose (or goosefu) and, preparing a meal as one prepares a text for publication, feast in something approaching a warm and well-nourished revelry. I should note, by way of introduction, that a substantial part of my undergraduate experience involved learning to typeset and work as a devil, as typesetters mischievously call it, in a letterpress studio. This accounts in part for my fascination and helps to explain the fact that, when I began to leaf around in medieval beastiaries in lieu of being able to procure a goose, I was almost immediately struck by a fantastic monster that I hereby elect to be the mascot for our so-called para-academic practice(s) the relatively famed, but no less fabulous for it, barnacle goose. The barnacle goose is a creature that first makes its way into 12th century manuscripts with Giraldus Cambrensis in 1186. Phenomenologically speaking the monster is a tree, a tree which, when approached closer is seen to be birthing geese budding from the buds that hang like ripe fruit from its branches. As the story goes these trees were found over water; the fledgling geese, once wrested from their pods would take off in flight or fall to their watery death, where they would be transformed into driftwood. In retrospect we presume the barnacle goose was posited as a consequence of the fact that geese born in more northern regions, migrating to Ireland and western Europe at large, were never seen to give birth. And I should note that this is far from the only other animal posited to be born from trees at around this time, my other favorite being medieval accounts of Moroccan tree-climbing goats. 2 In particular I’ve thrown up the mascot of the barnacle goose and singled it out from the quires of its beatiaries because its thoroughly hybrid origins lead us to name two very real creatures we can find point to in abundance; discrete materialities of the world cobbled together in textual fancy: on the one hand, the modern day barnacle goose , a common species of goose and, on the other, goose barnacles , a particular type of crustacean with incredible feathery tendrils and—I can't help but mention—one of the largest body mass to penis size ratios of all of the animals in the kingdom. Why is this bit of genital trivia relevant? Because they’re all hermaphroditic and in rare cases have been found to reproduce just with themselves—to inseminate themselves and give birth to their kin. So I think it must be stressed, as a symbol for what we’re really here to talk about, it's not a boy’s club thing so much as a very queer thing and, I contend, para - in every perfect sense of the word... Alongside the natural world, a monstrous imaginary concatenation; Alongside the hulls of so many institutional structures, funding sources and resources, Serresian parasites in all manner of mutualist, symbiotic, or properly parasitic positions; migratory and adrift; The tree, center stage in the 21st century adaptation of Waiting for Godot that is unraveling in ateliers across the world, is a barnacle goose birthing a flurry of miscegenous texts beyond medium and genre. PROVOCATION 1: CHAOSMOSIS “Genre is obsolete.” — Ray Brassier 3 And so, here I was getting carried away in daydreams about this generative and genealogical symbol under which to think all of the diverse projects we are all involved in as architects of the dressed word, (well dressed, bespoke, mansy, butch, careless, or roguishly punk attired as those words may be), when it also dawned on me, mid-flight here from Denver, that we are, even in lieu of being able to roast geese together, very much so literalizing what was never just the metaphor of the wayzgoose—a tradition, as you know, celebrated to mark the crepuscular turn into fall—as we are poised here, tomorrow being the first official day of fall on our calendars in the US marking the seasonal change from at which point it will no longer be possible to print without the aid of candlelight. A beautiful thought, that tipped into magical thinking on account of a little quick math I was able to do to come to the conclusion that we can all be delighted to know that as we proceed into the autumn with our printing projects always ahead of us and still to be set, we will tonight be bathed not only by the artificial candlelight of our screens, but also in part by photons raining down on us at 186,282 miles per second—photons from an aspect of 9 cyg, a stereoscopic binary deep within Cygnus, the swan but not-so-distant-relative of the goose, with a distance of 572 Light years away; photons that are raining down on us, will rain down on us all winter, have been raining down on us all year, and which had their origin in the combustion cores at a center of 9 cyg 572 years ago, in 1440, the year which we point to today as the common year in which, as we all know, Gutenberg is said to have brought the movable type to the western world, inaugurating an era that stretches farther into the past and future than McLuhan could justify; the proliferation of so much ambient text; insurrectionary coups on (and re-crystallizations of) genre—perceived amidst so much ambient light—enveloping this campus, just now. So, with that thought, and perhaps a new mascot, Nico Jenkins... NOTES “ Writing as Metadata Container, An Interview with Tan Lin ,” Chris Alexander, Kristen Gallagher, Danny Snelson, Gordon Tapper, Tan Lin, Jacket 2. January 20, 2012. To explore Lin’s notion of ambient textuality, plagiarism, and parallel, cross­platform publication in the 21st century, also see Lin’s sampled novel, “ The Patio and the Index ,” Triple Canopy 14, October 24, 2011, as well as the Edit event, organized at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, April, 2010 . For a fascinating and fecund exploration of medieval plant­animal hybrids in relation to media ecology, see Whitney Trettien, “ Becoming Plant: Magnifying a Microhistory of Media Circuits in Nehemiah Grew’s Anatomy of Plants (1682) .” postmedieval 3.1 (2012):97. See also the crowd­review version of the essay. “ Genre Is Obsolete .” Compléments de Multitudes . 28 (2007). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aëtıana. The Method and Intellectual Context of a Doxographer, Volume One: The Sources by J. Mansfeld and D. T. RuniaA. A. LongJ. Mansfeld and D. T. Runia. Aëtıana. The Method and Intellectual Context of a Doxographer, Volume One: The Sources. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1997. Pp. xxii + 371. Cloth, $135.50In this book, the first of a projected series of volumes, Mansfeld and Runia have begun a massive investigation (...) of the (mainly Greek) authors on whom we moderns rely for information about the numerous Greek philosophers whose works have not survived. The thousand-year tradition of Greek philosophy, extending from the Presocratics to Neoplatonism, is largely a story told via quotations, biographies, classifications, epitomes and criticisms. A few great works survive intact, including especially the dialogues of Plato, the technical writings of Aristotle, the sceptical books of Sextus Empiricus, and the Enneads of Plotinus; we also have most of the work on lost philosophers composed by such prolific authors as Cicero, Plutarch and Galen, and there are other well-known “sources,” such as the ten books of Lives and Doctrines, compiled by Diogenes Laertius. The present volume, however, deals with more recondite material: a work (P) on the physical doctrines of the philosophers, misattributed to Plutarch; a similar work, misattributed to Galen (G); the anthology of the Byzantine scholar Stobaeus (S); some chapters of Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica (E); a work of Christian apologetics by the Syrian bishop Theodoret (T); and (in less detail) a few further writers from later antiquity.What unifies this set of authors is the thesis put forward by Hermann Diels in his monumental Doxographi Graeci (1879), to the effect that all of them, directly or indirectly, are derived from a single work composed in about 100 CE by Aetius. According to Diels, Aetius derived his material from a much older collection (Vetusta Placita), and this, in its turn, was ultimately dependent on an extensive work by Aristotle’s pupil and successor, Theophrastus. Diels’ thesis, which underpins his collection of testimonia for the Presocratics (the “A” fragments of Diels/Kranz Vorsokratiker), has been the foundation of all subsequent work on the sources of fragmentary Greek (especially Presocratic) philosophers. Diels gave the name “doxography” to the genre of writing he took to be represented by Aetius and the authors of similar accounts of philosophical doctrines.The volume under review explains, tests, supplements, and revises just that part of Diels’ thesis which invokes Aetius and the subsequent sources supposedly derived from this lost work. Mansfeld and Runia are uniquely qualified for this daunting task. Each of them has worked extensively on the historiography of Greek philosophy. As a Dutch duo in this volume, they bring unrivalled expertise to bear on revisiting the work of the formidable Diels.The good news is that Diels’ Aetian hypothesis has been vindicated for the most part. Although the name Aetius is attested to by only Theodoret, Diels was quite right to deduce that Aetius’ compilation was the source of the material common to P, S, and T, and that E and G make extensive use of P. Hence scholars of ancient philosophy can continue to impose confidence in that part of Diels’ work which takes the story from Aetius into later antiquity. This finding means that the work of Mansfeld and Runia will hardly change one’s judgment concerning what can be known about the actual doctrines of fragmentary philosophers.What it will particularly affect is one’s understanding of the lost Aetius himself and [End Page 523] the surviving authors whose work is directly derived from him. The core of this book (primarily composed by Runia) is a set of chapters on P, S, and T, in which these three authors are studied for their own sake and their different methodologies carefully set out. Diels, under the influence of nineteenth-century philology, treated P, S, and T as if they were variant manuscripts rather than distinct authors. This misled him into regarding the doxographical tradition as much more uniform than it actually is. In earlier works both Mansfeld and Runia have greatly illuminated the dialectical and classificatory ways in which philosophical doctrines were... (shrink)

This article focuses on how exposure to different media genres relates to two components of attitudes, Muslims as a group and Islam as a religion. It also highlights how these components mediate the relationship between media exposure and behavioral intention, namely voting intention towards banning veiling in public spaces. The analysis builds on an online survey conducted in Switzerland. We found that exposure to specific media genres is not equally associated with attitudes towards Muslims versus attitudes towards Islam. (...) Contrary to our expectation, we did not find the association to be stronger when it came to influencing attitudes towards Muslims as compared to influencing attitudes towards Islam. However, our findings clearly showed that it matters whether people consume news via television or newspapers, especially mass-market (commercial television and tabloids) versus upmarket news (public television and quality newspapers). Attitudes towards Muslims living in Switzerland are more negative among those consuming mass-market news than those consuming upmarket news. Anti-Islam attitudes, however, were only associated with reading newspapers—both tabloids and quality newspapers. The findings provided only partial support for the mediating role of attitudes towards Muslims and Islam concerning the indirect relation between media exposure and voting intention towards banning veiling. (shrink)