53 research outputs found
A pragmatic cognitive model for the interpretation of verbalâvisual communication in television news programmes
The combination of the verbal and the visual track in television news discourse poses a considerable analytical challenge. In the viewersâ minds the co-habitation of these two semiotic channels triggers a complex network of inferential processes, based on expectations of coherence and relevance, with which they make sense of the representation of the world offered in the news. Through the analysis of a number of news items, this article considers the cognitive processes which viewers may activate when extracting meaning from the multimedial messages contained in television news. The analysis of news items from two British television networks offered by the authors traces the possible meanings that, it is assumed, become available to a potential, âidealisedâ or âimpliedâ viewer, who accesses the information with some social and cultural knowledge of contemporary Britain. Building on existing studies, the article proposes a model for the classification of verbalâvisual relations
The construction of identity through visual intertextuality in a Bohemian early modern travelogue
Cultural historians have long been concerned with visual sources. Their research has centred on ways of reading images and how they can most accurately be interpreted. This article focuses on an alternative aspect of these visual sources: on how images were made and used. It analyses how the identity of a Bohemian Catholic, Bed?ich z DonĂn, is constructed by his use of images in a travelogue based on his pilgrimage in the early 17th century. Highlighting the process of âvisual intertextualityâ, it claims that the ways in which DonĂn adopts and adapts visual images reveals his association with various affinity groups. The distinction between âactualâ and âhabitualâ intertextuality is applied to the analysis of this historical source and shows how competing voices are present in the images. This article is an example of how historians can use the methodologies of semioticians to benefit their research
Psychoanalytic sociology and the traumas of history: Alexander Mitscherlich between the disciplines
This article examines the way aspects of recent history were excluded in key studies emerging from psychoanalytic social psychology of the mid-twentieth century. It draws on work by Erikson, Marcuse and Fromm, but focuses in particular on Alexander Mitscherlich. Mitscherlich, a social psychologist associated with the later Frankfurt school, was also the most important psychoanalytic figure in postwar Germany. This makes his work significant for tracing ways in which historical experience of the war and Nazism was filtered out of psychosocial narratives in this period, in favour of more structural analyses of the dynamics of social authority. Mitscherlich?s 1967 work The Inability to Mourn, co-authored with Margarete Mitscherlich, is often cited as the point at which the ?missing? historical experience flooded back into psychoanalytic accounts of society. I argue that this landmark publication doesn?t hail the shift towards the psychoanalysis of historical experience with which it is often associated. These more sociological writers of the mid-century were writing before the impact of several trends occurring in the 1980s-90s which decisively shifted psychoanalytic attention away from the investigation of social authority and towards a focus on historical trauma. Ultimately this is also a narrative about the transformations which occur when psychoanalysis moves across disciplines
The language of belonging
The authors combine a theoretical reassessment of how we understand, study and analyze processes of identification with detailed case studies of the discourses of three-generation families living in split-border communities along the former Iron Curtain, talking about themselves and other social groups, about their way of life and their experiences past and present
The language of belonging
The authors combine a theoretical reassessment of how we understand, study and analyze processes of identification with detailed case studies of the discourses of three-generation families living in split-border communities along the former Iron Curtain, talking about themselves and other social groups, about their way of life and their experiences past and present
On what citizens mean by feeling 'European' : perceptions of news, symbols and borderless-ness
What is âEuropeâ for citizens? What do people mean when they say that they feel, or not, European? A growing amount of literature has been produced by political scientists and journalists alike to try and assess the absence or existence of a European identity, but it is very unclear what people tell us when answering our questions on their political identities. Multiple theories of political identities exist, imposing fairly rigid and untested (and, essentially, quantitatively untestable) assumptions on what they mean. No deductive technique, however, would allow us to let citizens explain to us the deeper signification of citizensâ answers to our questions on who they are and how they perceive their attachment to varying political communities. Therefore, this paper presents an analysis of a series of focus group discussions run in France, the UK, and the Netherlands with over ninety participants on what citizens believe to be âEuropeâ and âEuropeansâ. They tell us how they believe the media inform them on Europe, and how they perceive the main symbols of the European Union. They explain what matters to them in terms of their direct experience of European integration, and finally, what a âEuropean identityâ means to them and whether they think of themselves and of their peoples as European or not. We discover that citizens are relatively cynical with regards to the perceived bias of the media on the European question, derive impressionistic but somewhat surprising findings on the meaning they attribute to Europe through its symbols, with references to peace, cosmopolitanism and other âanti-identityâ values, and that ultimately, their predominant perception of European-ness relies, precisely, on the disappearance of internal EU borders. Finally, we can identify two main âwaysâ for citizens to define a European identity, a predominantly âcivicâ one, and the other, a predominantly âculturalâ one
Border discourse Changing nations, identities and stories in Polish and German border communities
Period of award 1 May 1999 to 30 Oct 2000Available from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:3739.0605(000222899) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo
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