Taking a Marked Stance through Evaluative Lexical Items: A Study of Selected Features of Obama’s and Trump’s Inaugural Speeches

The paper presents an analysis of Obama’s and Trump’s inaugural addresses with a view to evidencing how language can be manipulated and also reveal the speaker’s political and ideological stance through the use of marked and evaluative lexical items. The language sample selected for analysis contains personal pronouns and possessive adjectives ‘you, your, we, us, our, ours, ourselves, they, their, them, themselves’, determiner ‘other’ and the term ‘America’ with all its derivative forms as used in the two speeches.

Between Textual Borrowing and Forgery. On Compilatory Practices of Medieval Universal Chroniclers Based on Martinus Polonus

The author’s goal is to add to the understanding of the issue of where the border line is that marks the passage from an enlarged copy (an augmented or developed version) of a given chronicle to an independent authorial entity. In this context a side question arises concerning the acceptability of textual borrowing in the face of medieval authorial practices and conventions, i.e. where compiling ends and falsifying begins. The aforementioned issues are discussed on the basis of five historiographical texts composed between the mid–thirteenth and the third quarter of the 15th cent. Their common denominator is their affinity with the famous Chronicle of Popes and Emperors by Martin the Pole (or of Oppavia). Examining the character of the borrowings, their ideological stance, and their political opinions, the author reaches the conclusion that it was not the copy–and–paste technique frequently employed by the chroniclers, but their intentions that decide whether the resulting works should be treated as new entities, sometimes even forgeries.

Agents of May Fourth. Jing Yinyu, Xu Zhongnian, and the Early Introduction of Modern Chinese Literature in France

Jing Yinyu (1901-1931?) and Xu Zhongnian (1904-1981) played a pivotal role in the dissemination of modern Chinese literature in France at the turn of the 1930s. Best known as Lu Xun’s first translator into a Western language and a friend of Romain Rolland’s, Jing compiled the Anthologie des conteurs chinois modernes in 1929. In his Anthologie de la littérature chinoise. Des origines à nos jours, published in 1932, Xu also devoted a section to recent literary developments. By analyzing the nature of the two projects, the translated corpora, and their paratexts, I will describe the features of Jing’s and Xu’s dissemination of May Fourth literature in France and scrutinize their artistic and ideological stance vis-à-vis the new literary scene. Ultimately, I will attempt to pinpoint in what terms the two scholars-cum-translators’ agency contributed to foreign readers’ awareness of the cultural, social and political experience of the May Fourth Movement.

The Living and the Dead

Although the party systems of Central Europe have witnessed significant turbulence, some parties have survived. Endurance is more common among parties that built well-developed organizational structures, took a clear ideological stance as a standard-bearer on a major enduring issue divide of politics, and developed internal institutional structures that allow for a passing of the leadership baton when leaders had outlived their usefulness. In contrast, many new parties created in Central Europe do not have these characteristics. Their chances of survival are often diminished further by participation in government when they find it hard to deliver on their promises. Given the way that new parties begin, it is therefore not much of a surprise that most do not survive for more than a few election cycles. A few new parties were able to survive, but they did so mainly by actively choosing to acquire characteristics of the long-established parties.

THE AESCHYLEAN STING IN WASPS’ TALE: ARISTOPHANES’ ENGAGEMENT WITH THE ORESTEIA

The sting to Aristophanes’ ‘little tale’ in Wasps (λογίδιον, Vesp. 64) materializes from the comedy's interplay with the Oresteia. This article argues that Aristophanes alludes to both Agamemnon and Eumenides in the scenes running up to (and including) the trial scene, and that he exploits this intertext in the cloak scene (Vesp. 1122–264). While isolated allusions to the Oresteia have been identified in Wasps, a systematic consideration of these references has not been undertaken: a surprising absence in discussions of the ongoing competition between the comic and the tragic genres permeating Wasps’ dramatic action. Moreover, Aristophanes’ engagement with the Oresteia offers a special type of tragic intertext, in which the first and the last plays of a connected trilogy are referenced simultaneously, provocatively destabilizing the original. Furthermore, this allusion has implications for our understanding of a scene which recent scholarship has established as pivotal within the comedy, namely the cloak scene. The first part of this article, therefore, establishes the extent of Wasps’ engagement with the Oresteia and considers the significance of the ‘pastiche’ formed through the combined intertextual references to Agamemnon and to Eumenides. The second part explores the impact of this intertext on the interpretation of the cloak scene, revealing that its use of costume can be understood as a criticism of Aeschylus’ dramaturgy, inviting a negative reading of Bdelycleon's ideological stance and reinforcing the play's pessimistic view of the Athenian law courts.

The Birth of Heteroludoglossia from the Dissonant Languages of Videogames

This paper employs Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia as a frame­work to interpret internal tensions within contemporary digital games. To that end, I propose to acknowledge the multimodal character of entertain­ment software, with audial, visual, haptic, spatiotemporal and systemic elements of a game in constant interaction. But to properly understand said tensions — frequently dubbed “dissonance” in game criticism — it is im­portant to acknowledge the complex multimodal structure of games that attempt to utilize culturally-rooted ways to describe the world, sometimes trying to combine several such ways at once. As a result, ‚game-languages‘ are born: ways to utilize all game components to cover the specificity of certain narrative genres, to explain the nature of the world in terms con­sistent with its ideological stance. Quite often, one game combines several game-languages, and their mutually exclusive ideologies are a source of tension and dissonance. To illustrate the issue, I describe how three pri­mary game-languages of Uncharted 3 — the language of Adventure, the language of Heroics, and the language of the Traditional Game — compete to describe an armed conflict to the player.

“Confused Anarchy and the late civil broils”: The Politics of Genre in Milton’s Histories

The writing of history was seminal to Milton’s conception of himself as a humanist and is a key to our understanding of his literary career. Yet, Milton’s Brief History of Moscovia and The History of Britain occupy a unique position in the way in which they are poised between the humanist notion of history as counsel and history as an assertion of “republican” values. However, situating Milton in a climate of republicanism has othen been problematic and challenging. Like writers of humanist historical narratives, Milton’s primary aim was to guide the English people in their current political crisis by making the past an analogue of the present. I wish to contend that he approaches his intention generically: by a manipulative use of the genres of history and chorography, Milton is able to straddle the earlier notion of history with the later notions of “republicanism” that permeated the political climate of England in the aftermath of the Civil War. In an inversion of Shklovsky’s notion of “form shaping content”, Milton’s reliance on genre as a vehicle for articulating his political and ideological stance, ultimately results in content shaping form.

The Representation of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (BTP) as a Social Actor in the Collection of Hoax News Headlines on www.turnbackhoax.id

This study aims to describe the representation of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (BTP) as a social actor and to reveal the ideological stance of the media in collection of hoax news headlines. The approach used in this study is Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis (1995, 2013) with a textual metafunction theory as its analytical tool proposed by Halliday and Mattiessen (2014). The data of this study are 17 hoax news headlines that have been verified by their lies on the website www.turnbackhoax.id. The results of this study are (i) the theme and rheme used in the hoax news headlines can help organize messages and play an important role in the headlines from the perspective of the reader, (ii) BTP was explicitly represented as a social actor in some negative ways in those hoax news headlines such as he is supported by those who are not Pro-Islam, fails to eradicate prostitution, powerful person, not brave and involved in law case, (iii) the media’s ideological stance intentionally contradicted to other national media in publishing the hoax news headlines related to BTP and tended to highlight the news without the clear sources and exaggerate the headlines. Furthermore, the result of this study would be a helpful material source for those who would like to prepare the critical literacy materials, specifically, about how to identify the features of hoax news headlines

A Standard Reading of Selected Online Readers’ Comments on Domestic Violence against Men in Nigeria

The study performs a standard reading of online readers’ comments on Domestic Violence against Men (henceforth, DVAM). This is with a view to exploring how the readers’ comments develop dialogically to build up threads that depict salient motifs on DVAM in the Nigerian sociocultural domain. The specific objectives of the study are to identify the dialogic developments of threads among the commenters; construe motifs cum shared socio-cultural values in the identified threadal developments; and elicit the rhetorical implications of the threadal developments on the phenomenon of DVAM in Nigeria. The data comprise two purposively selected online news reports on DVAM with their readers' comments, sourced from the news archives of The News and Sahara Reporters. The study adopts the Dialogic Dual Reading Model as the analytical framework. The standard reading of the threadal developments of the readers’ comments in the two selected news reports reveals that a large number of the commenters maintain the ideological stance that DVAM is unjustifiable; some commenters, however, argue that acts of DVAM are often perpetrated in self-defense. This contrary ideological notion of self-defense not only portrays the women-offenders in these cases as victims but also justifies their acts of violence.