Reader Comments Agentive Power in COVID-19 Digital News Articles: Challenging Parascientific Information?

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an enormous stream of information. Parascientific digital communication has pursued different avenues, from mainstream media news to social networking, at times combined. Likewise, citizens have developed new discourse practices, with readers as active participants who claim authority. Based on a corpus of 500 reader comments from The Guardian, we analyse how readers build their authorial voice on COVID-19 news as well as their agentive power and its implications. Methodologically, we draw upon stance markers, depersonalisation strategies, and heteroglossic markers, from the perspective of discursive interpersonality. Our findings unearth that stance markers are central for readers to build authority and produce content. Depersonalised and heteroglossic markers are also resorted, reinforcing readers’ authority with external information that mirrors expert scientific communication. Conclusions suggest a strong citizen agentive power that can either support news articles, spreading parascientific information, or challenge them, therefore, contributing to produce pseudoscientific messages.

Framing the Qin collapse: redaction and authorship of the Shiji 史記

This paper explores the relationship between the Shiji’s authors and their sources by examining how they constructed the historical narrative of the fall of the Qin Empire. While Sima Qian and his father Sima Tan have been traditionally credited as the authors of the Shiji, their authorial voice was recently challenged by scholars. In response to the revisionist view, this paper discerns that the Shiji maintains a consistent narrative of the Qin collapse, which is generated through rigorous source redactions whereby Sima Qian and/or Sima Tan were able to incorporate their ideological agenda and personal opinions in subtle ways that are almost invisible to the reader. With such anonymity, the historiographers succeeded in establishing the authority of their historical narratives. Rather than simply juxtaposing the narratives of their sources, the Simas indeed authored their “patterned past” of the Qin collapse. However, the past constructed in the Shiji comprises various independent narratives whose plausibility is contingent upon the respective epistemic quality of their evidence rather than a harmonious discourse.

Lukion historian opettajien käsityksiä esseen arviointiin vaikuttavista piirteistä

Artikkelissa tarkastellaan lukion historian opettajien käsityksiä aineistopohjaisen esseen arvioinnista ja siihen vaikuttavista piirteistä tiedonalan tekstitaitojen näkökulmasta. Aineisto koostuu opettajien ryhmähaastatteluista ja lukiolaisten kirjoittamista aineistopohjaisista esseistä. Haastattelut analysoitiin laadullisen sisällönanalyysin avulla ja esseiden kielellisiä piirteitä systeemis-funktionaalisen kieliteorian avulla. Analyysissä keskityttiin opettajien arvostamiin esseen piirteisiin ja niiden kielellisiin toteumiin. Opettajien arvostamissa piirteissä korostuivat erityisesti sisältötiedon hallinta sekä tehtävänannon noudattaminen. Aineiston käyttöön ja opiskelijan omaan pohdintaan liittyviä odotuksia opettajilla oli vähemmän. Esseiden kielellinen analyysi osoitti, että historian oppiaineen kielen ja sisältötiedon hallinta kietoutuvat toisiinsa: käsitteiden käyttö, informaatiorakenteen sujuvuus ja analysoiva kirjoittajaääni vahvistavat vaikutelmaa sisältötiedon hallinnasta. History teachers’ beliefs about assessment of essays Abstract This article focuses on history teachers’ beliefs about the textual features relevant for assessing essays in general upper secondary school. The data comprise group discussions about essays that were analyzed with content analysis and the essays analyzed with systemic-functional theory. The focus was on linguistic realization of the features teachers valued. The results showed that history teachers particularly valued presenting historical knowledge and answering the task. They had fewer expectations about the use of the source material and students’ own argumentation. The linguistic analysis of the essays showed that language of history and historical knowledge intertwine: e.g. smooth information flow and analytical authorial voice demonstrate mastery. Keywords: assessment, disciplinary literacy, history, essay, systemic-functional theory

STANCE IN ADVANCED ACADEMIC WRITING BY SAUDI EFL POSTGRADUATES: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF CRITIQUE WRITING

Whether the postgraduate students in the EFL context are adequately trained to express their authorial voice in academic writing in an appropriate tone has not been clarified enough in the literature. The aim of this study is to explore the linguistic resources used by Saudi postgraduate students of Applied Linguistics to construct stance when they write critique essays. To achieve this goal, a corpus of 78000 words was built from 73 critique essays collected in five years. To analyze this corpus, LancsBox corpus analysis software was used to generate the concordances with frequencies of key words in context. The model of corpus analysis used was Hyland’s (2005) which views stance as a construct within a model of interaction in academic discourse that comprises boosters, hedges, attitude markers, and self-mentions. The major findings of the study showed that the most frequently used stance markers were hedges, followed by attitude markers, then boosters, and finally self-mentions. In addition, the linguistic resources used in these strategies of stance construction by the students in this particular context need to be enhanced in order to conform with conventional standards of academic writing. To meet this ambitious requirement, the study recommends explicit instruction, training, and showcasing these textual resources as they occur in high quality discipline-specific publications.

The Author is Dead, Long Live the Author! Postmodern Metanarrative and the Performance of the Author Function

This research paper critically examines the meta-narrative text The Master of Petersburg, a novel by Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee, which has the figure of the author at the centre of its narrative structure. In his fictions, Coetzee is not shy of dislodging what Roland Barthes calls ‘reality effect’ in order to critically assert the role of the authorial figure; this is also to be seen in the novel Slow Man where Coetzee ruptures the realist texture of the narrative by introducing the figure of Elizabeth Costello who enters the text, as well as the life of Paul Rayment an amputee, as the author figure who is responsible for her creation i.e. Paul Rayment himself. At the same time Coetzee in order to explore the issues of writing at its ethical dimension, transforms some realist tropes at his disposal. For instance, in Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee with a brilliant manoeuvre plays on the trope of epistolary novels and presents the novel in a form of a series of lectures delivered by Elizabeth Costello, an Australian author of international fame. But in a brilliant ironical move, Coetzee through the performance of the authorial voice breaks the realist structure of the Novel. The paper will, however, primarily focus on the novel The Master of Petersburg (1994), which is a meta-narrative in which Coetzee actively interrogates the ethics of writing as in this novel he places the fictively re-imagined figure of Dostoevsky in Petersburg in late 1868, after the murder of his step-son Pavel. In this novel like his earlier novel Foe(1986), Coetzee examines the process of artistic creation and ethics involved in the event of writing, as Coetzee in his novel evokes a mix of historical factors and fictive characteristics which inspired and featured in Dostoevsky’s novel The Devils. Through a close examination of the interstitial spaces between the two novels, this paper explores the figure of the author and its performance in postmodern fiction. The author as the figure has caused much debate in the postmodern fiction and narrative theory. Post Roland Barthes’s declaration ‘author is dead’ many deconstructionist and narrative theories have debated the relevance of author figure in fiction, and the meta-narrative and self-referential nature of postmodern literature make these debates even more potent. This paper seeks to explore the debate concerning the author figure from Bakhtin, Barthes, Bennet and Foucault and try to understand the implications which the author figure has in a postmodern text through a close examination of Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg.

The Jack-Roller and the Life History Method: Notes on the Chicago School’s Clifford Shaw and Howard Becker’s Humanistic Narrative of Young Male and Female Delinquents in Different Ages

Clifford Shaw’s (1930) The Jack-Roller is a landmark study of naturalism, ethnography and crime. It is the ‘own story’ of Stanley—a young delinquent in Chicago. Shaw’s series of ethnographic studies on delinquency sought to humanize deviance in opposition to pathological understandings of delinquency. The article looks on the representation of crimes committed and punishment received by young male and female delinquents. Shaw’s argument focuses on structural inequalities and poverty as the cause of deviance; as a result, female delinquency was not explained by sexual promiscuity, although he failed to recognize young women’s vulnerabilities. The second edition of The Jack-Roller introduced by Howard Becker (1966, Introduction. The Jack-Roller: A delinquent boy’s own story, pp. v–xviii) redefined Shaw’s study within the symbolic interactionist tradition. From the 1950s, Shaw and Becker disagreed over the writing of the deviant’s ‘own story,’ the control of the narrative and the authorial voice. The article adds to the literature on narrative, female deviance and youth delinquency.

Colonel V. A. Pashkov: Leader of Russia’s Lost Reformation

The reviewer considers Filipp Nikitin’s new book on Colonal Vasilii A. Pashkov, a Russian Evangelical leader in the 1870s and 1880s. A rich Russian aristocrat and landowner, Pashkov was an unlikely missionary, but his conversion at the hands of the British Lord Radstock in 1874 led to a lifetime of preaching and charity among both social elites and the lowest members of society. Although initially not in conflict with the Russian Orthodox Church, Pashkov’s increasing prominence and his efforts to unite Russia’s various Evangelical movements led to his exile in 1884, where he remained for the rest of his life. The reviewer compliments Nikitin’s comprehensive use of archival sources, drawn from a huge number of collections in Russia and abroad. This makes his book a significant contribution to the historiography, much of which is fragmented or out of date. The author’s decision to release previously unpublished documents in the book’s appendix is an excellent contribution. However, the reviewer points out that Nikitin quotes too much from and relies too heavily on source material, which drowns out his authorial voice: it is argued that the author should spend more time analysing the sources rather than just quoting them. The reviewer also suggests bringing in more contextualisation and consulting some of the recent conceptual approaches to religious biography.

ATTITUDE REALIZATION IN NEWS REPORTS: AN INTERPRETATION THROUGH AN APPRAISAL ANALYSIS

For the maintenance of the authorial voice, newspapers use rhetorical markers as an external supporting voice to win their readership. The current five year studies show that news writers maintain engagement with their readers by their stances towards their point of views. This study aimed to find the attitudinal stances of two Pakistani Online newspapers i.e. 'Dawn' (alternative newspaper) and 'The News' (mainstream newspaper). The newspaper's inclination was identified through its language. To discover the newspapers' stances, Martin and White (2005) 'Appraisal Analysis' framework was employed on '2' news reports comprising of '5013' words on Prime Minister Imran Khan's Speech at 74th United Nations' session along with Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) by Norman Fairclough (1995). It was found that both newspapers indirectly invoked attitudes by laying evaluative ground which was explicitly explained in the quoted text. The prime minister of Pakistan Imran Khan was found the 'Appraiser' in both news reports and served as a main social actor in highlighting Pakistan's current issues. The issues expected to be solved urgently for peace and prosperity in the region by the involvement of world leaders and United Nations on Kashmir conflict between Pakistan and India, climate change and elimination of Islam phobia.

Mimowolna sylwa. O książce Anny Kaszuby-Dębskiej „Bruno. Epoka genialna”

The article offers a critical discussion of Anna Kaszuba-Dębska’s book Bruno. Epoka genialna [Bruno. The Age of Genius]. The reviewer argues that the main feature of Kaszuba-Dębska narrative is its heterogeneity; it manifests itself through the renouncement of the authorial voice, which it replaced by a dense tissue of quotations, as well as through the extensive discussion of cultural contexts and the lack of a consistently outlined dominant theme organizing the course of the protagonist’s life. For this reason, the reviewer regards Kaszuba-Dębska’s publication as a text reminiscent of a silva rerum (cf. commonplace book), whose heterogeneity, however, seems to stem from the author’s lack of control over her material, rather than from an attempt to cross the borders of the biographical genre.