The purpose of this course is to equip you to formulate well-founded, convincing and revealing arguments about the `rhetorical effects' of mass media discourse. That is to say, the course seeks to equip you to reach conclusions about, how media texts convey or reflect particular points of view, world views and systems of belief and with how, as result, they have the potential to influence, reinforce or change their audience's own assumptions, beliefs, attitudes and expectations. Towards this end, it will provide a framework of linguistic analysis designed to equip you to identify rhetorically significant features of texts and to formulate arguments about how particular linguistic features (verbal, visual and possibly auditory) give rise to particular communicative effects and rhetorical outcomes. Thus, in a nutshell, the course's purpose is equip you to argue about how media representations, interpretations, arguments and attitudes construe the world and position media audiences to evaluate it.
Semester 1 focuses primarily on news journalism. In semester 2, the focus will be broadened to include advertising, `life-style' journalism (for example men's and women's magazines) and argumentation of the type which is found not only in news commentary but also in arts (i.e. film, music, theatre) reviewing. An overview of the contents of the course in Semester 2 will be provided in January.
The course will provide tools for exploring the nature of mass media texts, their linguistic qualities, their role in society, their communicative effects and ultimately their ideological potential.
More specifically, to the course will explore:
A key concern of the workshops and course materials will be with news journalism - the reports, features, columns and editorials concerned with the daily round of natural disasters, accidents, crimes, economic setbacks, moral outrages and political upheavals which fill the front pages and evening bulletins.
Attention will also be directed to what can be termed `life-style' journalism of the type typically found in the `leisure' sections of newspapers and in men's and women's magazines and other special interest magazines.
Also, consideration will be given to advertisements since they too are a vital part of mass media communications, though the focus here will primarily be on those ads which address topics typically associated with news and current affairs - for example, ads concerned with politics, the environment, health, the food industry. (The treatment of advertising will be extended in the semester 2)
The lecture notes which should be read in advance for each seminar, are available for online reading or downloading from www.journalese.org/MediaLang/ - or if that link should not be working, try www.journalese.info/MediaLang/ In most weeks, some online interaction with the course materials will be required.
a. Seminar: Introduction and overview of semester 1 content.
b. (in preparation for following week) Website course materials ( interactive lecture notes) - Unit 1, Introduction.
c. (in preparation for following week) Readings: Fowler chapters 1 & 2 (see following bibliography - Fowler is available from the book shop and multiple copies are available from the library).
a. Seminar: Discussion, comments, debate arising from Unit 1 lecture notes (an introduction to key issues in the study of media discourse)
b. (in preparation for week 2) Website course materials ( interactive lecture notes) - Unit 2, Praising and Blaming - evaluation in news reporting (an introduction).
c. Readings: Gruber, H., 1993, `Evaluation devices in newspaper reports', Journal of Pragmatics, 19, 469-486.
a. Seminar: Review of course notes on evaluation in media discourse.
b. Website lecture notes: Unit 3, Media Genres
c. Readings: Goatly chapter 1 (see following bibliography - Goatly is available from the book shop and multiple copies are available from the library)
a. Seminar: Review of course notes/activities - Media Genres
b. Website lecture notes: Unit 4, Media Stories - the structure of the news report
c. Readings: Bell, A. 1998 (see bibliography below).
a. Seminar: Review of course notes/activities - Media Stories
b. Website lecture notes: Unit 5, The News Story as Rhetoric
c. Readings: Fowler, chapters 3 & 4
a. Seminar: Review of course notes/activities - Media Rhetoric
b. Website lecture notes: Essay writing workshop - approaches to Language Studies assignments
c. Prepare group presentations for week 8. (see below for explanation)
a. Seminar - the language studies essay
b. Website lecture notes: Unit 6A - Exploring visual imagery, Part 1.
c. Readings: Kress and van Leeuwen, 1998, Front Pages: (The Critical) Analysis of Newspaper Layout, in Approaches to Media Discourse, Bell, A. & Garrett, P. (eds), Oxford, Blackwell. Bell, A: Pages 186-291.
a. Seminar: class presentations
b. Website lecture notes: Unit 6B - Exploring visual imagery, Part 2.
c. Readings: Kress and van Leeuwen 1990 chapter 2.
a. Seminar: Review of notes and readings - exploring the visual
a. Website lecture notes: Unit 7, Reality, Representation and Point of View
b. Readings: Fowler 6 & 7; Goatly chapter 2.
a. Seminar: Reality, Representation and Point of View (how vocabulary and grammar reflects ideological perspectives.)
b. Advance readings for semester 2 - to be announced
In the early weeks of the semester, you will be invited to form small research groups (2 or 3 people) in order to undertake research projects in various topics in media discourse analysis. The purpose or these is to enable you to identify research topics, collect data and references, and develop the text analysis skills required for your assessed essays. Although the arrangements for the assessed essays do not permit the submission of jointly produced work (essays must be the individual work of one author), nevertheless it is possible to do a great deal of useful preparatory work in such groupings. The knowledge of the field, the collections of interesting/relevant texts and the analytical approaches which you develop for these projects can be directly applied to the production of the end-of-semester essays.
Accordingly, you will be invited to work with a group preparing research and analysis in one of the topic areas which will be set out below. Your preliminary findings will be presented to the class in week 8, either in an oral presentation during the seminar or via publication on the Journalese web site. It is expected the work presented here will form the basis of your end-of-the-semester essays.
In keeping with the course objectives outlined previously, all research projects (and assessed essays) in the course should ultimately be concerned in some way with `rhetorical effects' - with exploring the ways in which media texts convey or reflect particular points of view, world views and systems of belief and with how, as result, they have the potential to influence, reinforce or change their audience's own assumptions, beliefs, attitudes and expectations. The central concern of all projects (and essays) will be with relating particular rhetorical effects or potentials to specific linguistic features (verbal, visual or auditory) or patterns of features in the texts under consideration.
More specifically, you will be concerned with the following types of issue:
· What is the nature of the text's `voice' (its authorial persona) and what sort of relationship is constructed with the intended/imagined audience
In general there are two types of contexts in which you are likely to be exploring these issues:
· Similarity - here you are working with a group of texts which you believe, on the whole, are similar with respect to some key aspect of their rhetorical functionality. Thus you might be arguing, for example, that they reflect the same belief system, activate the same evaluative stance, position the audience in the same way, and so on. Here you task is to demonstrate, by reference to linguistic features and patterns, that the rhetorical effects you are arguing for do operate consistently across the texts. This type of analysis is typically conducted to demonstrate that, for example a particular newspaper adopts the same ideological posture when reporting on a given topic (for example, globalisation, asylum seekers, GM foods), or that a particular writer employs the same rhetorical strategies consistently across all his/her writings, or that a particular style of journalism (for example, that of the tabloids) consistently positions its audience in the same way, and so on.
1. Investigate some coverage relating to a specific issue - for example, the war on Iraq, asylum seekers, women in politics/big business, world poverty, anti-globalisation protests, GM foods, stem-cell research, global warming, the anti-fox hunting movement, the Euro, the crime rate, political corruption, obesity, religion in modern society etc etc. You could,
In the first instance your projects could be of the following types:
· contrast a current report with one from the past (obviously you would need to find an appropriate topic/issue - you might, for example, need to broaden the topic to something like `coverage of warfare', or `coverage of crime', `coverage of the rights of minorities' in order to locate reports which could be said to be on the `same' topic.
In the second instance (exploring similarities/differences) the most straightforward approach would probably be to select reports from the same source. However, there is nothing to stop you seeking to demonstrate that certain key rhetorical effects operate more widely in the mass media's coverage of certain issues - across different newspapers, across print and broadcast journalism, even across the journalisms of different cultures and/or languages. In which case, you would need to find appropriate reports - ones with which you can demonstrate the same rhetorical effects.
Research groups will present a report of their the findings in week 8. This will take the form of a summary of no more than 2000 words. This may include dot points, diagrams and tables. IN addition to the 2000 words of exposition, the summary may include appendices containing more detailed textual analyses and similar materials. This must be submitted in electronic form - preferably by email or via the file upload system which will be available on the journalese Web site - or failing that on a floppy disk. By a lottery system, some groups will be selected to present their findings in an oral presentation to the seminar group in week 8. The groups which miss out this time will give oral presentations in semester 2. The summaries of all groups will be posted on the Journalese web site.
It is expected that many of you will choose to continue with the topic of the research project in the final end-of-semester essay. This is encouraged, though definitely not required (you are free to pick a different topic should you so desire.) However, it must be stressed that the actual individual texts used in the research project cannot be used in the essay. That is to say, though you CAN choose the same topic and employ the same types of analyses, you must select new texts for your final essay. (So it would be wise to look for more text than you will need for the research project - analyse some for the week 8 presentation and then use the others in your essay.)
Each week there will work with both the online course materials ( www.journalese.org/MediaLang/ - or www.journalese.info/MediaLang/ ) and with readings from set texts. These need to be completed in advance of that week's session. The seminars will be conducted on the assumption that the readings have been completed and, accordingly, will primarily be devoted to addressing questions/issues/point of debate which have arisen from that week's readings and in applying the readings to analysing current media texts. In many instances, you will be required to have completed one or more text analyses in advance of the week's seminar.
You should either purchase copies of the core texts listed below or ensure that you have timely access to the multiple copies in the library. (If you are going to rely on the library copies it is strongly advised that you seek out the texts ahead of time since there are currently only a few short-term loan copies available: Fowler 6 copies; Goatly 6 copies)
Fowler, R. 1991. Language in the News - Discourse and Ideology in the Press, London, Routledge.
Goatly, A. 2000. Critical Reading and Writing - An Introductory Coursebook, London & New York, Routledge.
Selections will also be taken from
Kress, G. and T. van Leeuwen. 1990. Reading Images - The Grammar of Visual Design, Deakin University Press, Victoria (Australia): chapters 2 & 4
(multiple copies and short-term loan copies in library)
The following texts are not required reading but will be of assistance to those who wish either to enhance their knowledge of media studies analyses or to extend their knowledge of some useful text analysis tools.
Bell, A. 1998. 'The Discourse Structure of News Stories', in Approaches to Media Discourse, Bell, A. & Garrett, P. (eds), Oxford, Blackwell. Bell, A: Pages 64-105
Caldas-Coulthard, C. 1997, News as Social Practice, Santa Catarina, Ares.
Delin, J. 2000. 'The Language of Written News Reporting', in The Language of Everyday Life, Delin, J. London, Sage Publications: pp 11-37.
Kress, G. and T. van Leeuwen. 1996. Reading Images - The Grammar of Visual Design, Routledge, London
White, P.R.R. 1997. 'Death, Disruption and the Moral Order: the Narrative Impulse in Mass-Media Hard News Reporting.', in Genres and Institutions: Social Processes in the Workplace and School, Christie, F., Martin, J.R. (ed), London, Cassell.
White, P.R.R. 2000. 'Media Objectivity and the Rhetoric of News Story Structure', in DISCOURSE AND COMMUNITY. DOING FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTCS. Language in Performance 21., Ventola, E. (ed.), Tübingen, Gunter Narr Verlag.
White, P.R.R. to appear. 'News As History - First Drafting the Past', in Re-Reading the Past: Critical and Functional Perspectives on Time and Value, Martin, J. (ed.), Amsterdam, Benjamins. (copies available on request from P. White)
You may also like to tackle some of the writings of Norman Fairclough who is the leading figure behind what is know as Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). His work has been very influential but does require a certain degree of application. You might try, for example,
Fairclough, N. 1992. Discourse and Social Change, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press: only pages 169-200
Fairclough, N. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis : the Critical Study of Language, London , Longman. only pages 54-70
Fairclough, N. 1995. Media Discourse, London, Edward Arnold.
Carter, R., Goddard, A., Reah, D., Sanger, K., & Bowring, M. 1997. Working With Texts A Core Book for Language Analysis, London & New York, Routledge. only pages 83-108
Carter, R. and W. Nash. 1990. Seeing Through Language. A Guide to Styles of English Writing, Oxford, UK., Basil Blackwell: pages 61-99
Mills, S. 1995. Feminist Stylistics, London, Routledge. pages 128-159
The following are perhaps a bit basic, since they are aimed more at A-level and 1st year university than at 2nd year level students, but may still be useful if you are entirely new to linguistic analyses of the media
Reah, D. 1998. The Language of Newspapers, London, Routledge.
McLoughlin, L. 2000. The Language of Magazines, London, Routledge.