Anime Studies: Media-Specific Approaches to Neon Genesis Evangelion

Anime Studies: Media-Specific Approaches to Neon Genesis Evangelion aims at advancing the study of anime, understood as largely TV-based genre fiction rendered in cel, or cel-look, animation with a strong affinity to participatory cultures and media convergence. Taking Neon Genesis Evangelion (Shin Seiki Evangerion) as a case study, this volume acknowledges anime as a media form with clearly recognizable aesthetic properties, (sub)cultural affordances and situated discourses. First broadcast in Japan in 1995-96, Neon Genesis Evangelion became an epoch-making anime, and later franchise. The initial series used already available conventions, visual resources and narrative tropes typical of anime in general and the mecha (or giant-robot) genre in particular, but at the same time it subverted and reinterpreted them in a highly innovative and as such standard-setting way. Investigating anime through Neon Genesis Evangelion this volume takes a broadly understood media-aesthetic and media-cultural perspective, which pertains to medium in the narrow sense of technology, techniques, materials, and semiotics, but also mediality and mediations related to practices and institutions of production, circulation, and consumption. In no way intended to be exhaustive, this volume attests to the emergence of anime studies as a field in its own right, including but not prioritizing expertise in film studies and Japanese studies, and with due regard to the most widely shared critical publications in Japanese and English language. Thus, the volume provides an introduction to studies of anime, a field that necessarily interrelates media-specific and transmedial aspects. In Anime Studies: Media-Specific Approaches to Neon Genesis Evangelion, anime is addressed from a transnational and transdisciplinary stance. The disciplinary and methodological perspectives taken by the individual chapters range from audio-visual culture, narratology, performance and genre theory to fandom studies and gender studies. In its first part, the book focuses on textual analysis and media form in the narrow sense with regard to filmic media, bank footage, voice acting and musical score, and then it broadens the scope to consider subcultural discourse, franchising, manga and video game adaptations, as well as critical and affective user engagement.

Das Zeitkriterium in der Gattungstheorie und die frühmoderne Lyrikdiskussion

In genre theory, epic, dramatic and lyric poetry are often defined in terms of the past, present or future. This association of genres and time tenses is, howewer, far from being self-evident: The idea is widely unknown before 1800. Following recent studies on time and genre, my article traces this ›time criterion‹ back from Emil Staiger to its origins in the mid-18th century and into the German and French Enlightenment’s discourses on poetry.

Rule by law versus rule of law: A multimodal analysis of persuasion and legal ideologies in anti-corruption discourse in China

The authors conduct a multimodal analysis of the anti-corruption discourse in China by employing the SFL genre theory and the SF-MDA approach. Anti-corruption discourse that popularizes the anti-corruption mechanism and educates the officials constitutes an important part of China’s anti-corruption campaign. This paper first presents a genre analysis of a corpus of 51 anti-corruption videos on the official public legal education website to examine how these videos are designed in their overall organization to achieve the persuasion purpose—alert officials to stay away from corruption. It is found that most anti-corruption videos are expositions that are embedded with different story genres and emphasize the negative consequence of corruption on one’s family. Using Multimodal Analysis Video software, the authors then analyze the different reader stances enacted through a range of multimodal resources in three representative anti-corruption videos. Based on the detailed multimodal analysis, the authors finally explain how the use of linguistic and visual resources in the videos realizes the underlying ideologies of rule by law and rule of law and future implications of this study.

Self-improvement books: A genre analysis

<p>The aim of the thesis is to explore the characteristics of self-improvement books as a genre. Although self-improvement books are a widely read genre, particularly in the Western world, none to my knowledge has examined the linguistic features of this genre in detail. The thesis draws on the three main schools of genre theory: English for Specific Purposes, Systemic Functional Linguistics, and the New Rhetoric, and begins by investigating the sections (e.g., acknowledgement, introduction chapter) in self-improvement books and the typicality of the sections. Focusing on three sections: introduction chapters, body chapters, and about the author sections, the thesis examines how authors structure the sections by analysing the moves and steps. This study also examines the stories in self-improvement books by analysing the purpose of the stories and their structure. Stories were chosen because they seemed to be a feature of self-improvement books based on my observation and as suggested by interview data. To analyse self-improvement books at a register level, the thesis examines the most unambiguous aspects of engagement: personal pronouns focusing on you, imperative clauses, and questions. It also examines the lexicogrammatical features of self-improvement book titles and compares them to the titles of historical biographies, showing that imperative clauses and ing-clause are found only in self-improvement book titles. Drawing on interview data and literature on the American Dream, American individualism, Neoliberalism, and New Age beliefs, the thesis explains how the linguistic characteristics of the genre of self-improvement books reflect these ideologies. The dataset for the study is 40 self-improvement books, selected on the basis of a set of criteria that I developed. Subsets were selected from the main dataset for specific analyses. The text analysis part of the study is supplemented by interview data from specialist informants, who come from three categories: readers of the genre, non-readers of the genre, and authors of the genre. Move analysis identifies obligatory rhetorical moves and indicates that the main purposes of introduction chapters and about the author sections are persuading readers to read the book, and establishing credibility, respectively. Authors always persuade readers to read their books by listing reasons to read them. To demonstrate authors’ credibility, they refer to their areas of expertise. Unlike the introduction chapters and about the author sections, the body chapters have more than one obligatory rhetorical move. The body chapters present the problem that readers potentially experience, present the authors’ message, recommend practical applications, and encourage readers to apply them. From a genre perspective, the purpose of all the stories in my analysis is to illustrate the authors’ message. Register analysis, and drawing on interview data, suggests that authors use the personal pronoun you, imperative clauses, and questions to engage readers. The abundance of the personal pronoun you suggests that self-improvement books are a reader-oriented genre. The analysis of the imperative clauses using Halliday’s process types suggests that the main way to improve our lives, the authors recommend, is to change how we think. Finally, my thesis shows that the social purpose of self-improvement books is to help potential readers improve their lives, and the approach of improving one’s life has an individualistic orientation.</p>

Self-improvement books: A genre analysis

<p>The aim of the thesis is to explore the characteristics of self-improvement books as a genre. Although self-improvement books are a widely read genre, particularly in the Western world, none to my knowledge has examined the linguistic features of this genre in detail. The thesis draws on the three main schools of genre theory: English for Specific Purposes, Systemic Functional Linguistics, and the New Rhetoric, and begins by investigating the sections (e.g., acknowledgement, introduction chapter) in self-improvement books and the typicality of the sections. Focusing on three sections: introduction chapters, body chapters, and about the author sections, the thesis examines how authors structure the sections by analysing the moves and steps. This study also examines the stories in self-improvement books by analysing the purpose of the stories and their structure. Stories were chosen because they seemed to be a feature of self-improvement books based on my observation and as suggested by interview data. To analyse self-improvement books at a register level, the thesis examines the most unambiguous aspects of engagement: personal pronouns focusing on you, imperative clauses, and questions. It also examines the lexicogrammatical features of self-improvement book titles and compares them to the titles of historical biographies, showing that imperative clauses and ing-clause are found only in self-improvement book titles. Drawing on interview data and literature on the American Dream, American individualism, Neoliberalism, and New Age beliefs, the thesis explains how the linguistic characteristics of the genre of self-improvement books reflect these ideologies. The dataset for the study is 40 self-improvement books, selected on the basis of a set of criteria that I developed. Subsets were selected from the main dataset for specific analyses. The text analysis part of the study is supplemented by interview data from specialist informants, who come from three categories: readers of the genre, non-readers of the genre, and authors of the genre. Move analysis identifies obligatory rhetorical moves and indicates that the main purposes of introduction chapters and about the author sections are persuading readers to read the book, and establishing credibility, respectively. Authors always persuade readers to read their books by listing reasons to read them. To demonstrate authors’ credibility, they refer to their areas of expertise. Unlike the introduction chapters and about the author sections, the body chapters have more than one obligatory rhetorical move. The body chapters present the problem that readers potentially experience, present the authors’ message, recommend practical applications, and encourage readers to apply them. From a genre perspective, the purpose of all the stories in my analysis is to illustrate the authors’ message. Register analysis, and drawing on interview data, suggests that authors use the personal pronoun you, imperative clauses, and questions to engage readers. The abundance of the personal pronoun you suggests that self-improvement books are a reader-oriented genre. The analysis of the imperative clauses using Halliday’s process types suggests that the main way to improve our lives, the authors recommend, is to change how we think. Finally, my thesis shows that the social purpose of self-improvement books is to help potential readers improve their lives, and the approach of improving one’s life has an individualistic orientation.</p>

Translating into Textual Genres

When we translate, we do so for specific communicative situations and purposes; that is, we write translations that will fulfil the needs and conventions of specific textual genres in the target language and culture. The aim of this article, which draws on data and experience from the GENTT project, is to explore the relationship between translation and genre theory in order to understand better how translators are involved in interlinguistic and intercultural communication.Genre theory is attractive to Translation Studies because it links the micro level of writing and text to the macro level of discourse and context, unites process with product and integrates the cognitive, social and profes¬sional approaches to translation. Thus, the notion of genre brings together critical elements in translation such as the reader ’s profile, expectations and preferences; the communicative situation and purpose; and the socio-cultural context. In order to understand better how translators are involved in interlinguistic and intercultural communication, we suggest a remodelling of translation in which the target genre plays a central role.

Martin on discourse semantics, genre, educational linguistics

J. R. Martin is a leading scholar who has greatly developed the theoretical framework of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) over the past four decades. Some of these contributions, such as the systems of discourse semantics, the appraisal framework and genre relations have been widely applied in various areas of linguistic studies and language education. The educational linguistic model he and his colleagues have cultivated and developed has attracted the attention of more and more educators from different disciplines around the globe. In this interview, he firstly elaborates on the significance of the concepts of discourse semantics, grammatical metaphor and genre. Then he continues with applications of genre theory in secondary school education, language maintenance, the relation and collaboration between Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) and SFL, and how the two paradigms complement each other. Finally, he introduces some of his recent collaborations with grammarians of different languages.

The Novel in the Spanish Silver Age

What distinguishes an adventure novel from a historical novel? Can the same text belong to several genres? More to one than to another? Have some existing genres been overlooked? To answer these and similar questions, José Calvo Tello combines methods from Linguistics (lexicography), Literary Studies (genre theory), and Computer Science (machine learning, natural language processing). Located in the interdisciplinary field of Digital Humanities, this study analyzes a newly developed corpus of 358 Spanish novels of the silver age (1880-1939), which includes authors like Baroja, Pardo Bazán, or Valle-Inclán. Calvo Tello's key result is a graph-based model of literary genre that reconciles recent theoretical approaches.

I am what I am: Exploring the identity construal in Pakistani School EFL Textbooks

This paper aims at exploring how identity is construed in children’s literature and how the powerful legitimize to identify the textbook consumers by exercising their influence. Drawing on Systemic-functional Linguistics (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014), particularly Genre theory (Martin and Rose, 2008), it examines how English language textbooks used in Pakistan are written to construe, a project, and normalize a particular sociocultural identity. The sociocultural positioning being projected through the textbooks can be norm-conforming, contesting or can suggest otherwise. The majority of the students in Pakistan are mandated to learn state governed textbooks which serve them build up a sociopolitical identity. Therefore, underlying semiotic modalities realizing a perspective are pertinent to be explored in order to unfold discursive strategies for constructing identity. It is widely acknowledged that any educational curriculum is the most effective tool to construct and circulate a reality. Therefore, challenging any literacy pedagogy embedding particular outcomes can help transforming educational practices across the school curriculum (Martin and Rose, 2012). The data comprises Punjab English textbooks for the government schools. The findings suggest that the intriguing intricacies of textbook discourses can be successfully examined through analyzing linguistic patterns and that the textbooks construe sociocultural identity. The findings also provide insightful implications for discourse analysis based on SFL by contributing explorations of identity.

Functionalization and informalization in the design of an online fashion shop

This paper presents a multimodal analysis of the design of an online fashion shop. Departing from systemic-functional genre theory, it analyses the functionality of the site, bringing out how it designs what sellers do to and for consumers and what the site does and does not enable consumers to do. Drawing on Joos’ analysis of (in)formality in language and Hall’s proxemics, the paper then analyses how the site conceals the power of its functional design by simulating informality and solidarity in a way that ultimately remains one-way and cannot be reciprocated. It finally argues that designs of consumer behaviour similar to that of the analysed site increasingly stand as a model for the digitization of other domains of practice, including education and research, so extending what Fairclough called the ‘marketization of discourse’ into these other domains.