1st Edition
Stylistic Approaches to Pop Culture
This collection showcases the unique potential of stylistic approaches for better understanding the multifaceted nature of pop culture discourse. As its point of departure, the book takes the notion of pop culture as a phenomenon characterized by the interaction of linguistic signs with other modes such as imagery and music to examine a diverse range of genres through the lens of stylistics. Each section is grouped around thematic lines, looking at literary fiction, telecinematic discourse, music and lyrics, as well as cartoons and video games. The 12 chapters analyze different forms of media through five central strands of stylistics, from sociolinguistic, pragmatic, cognitive, multimodal, to corpus-based approaches. In drawing on these various stylistic frameworks and applying them across genres and modes, the contributions offer readers deeper insights into the role of scripted and performed language in social representation and identity construction, thereby highlighting the affordances of stylistics research in studying pop cultural texts. This volume is of particular interest to students and researchers in stylistics, linguistics, literary studies, media studies, and cultural studies.
Introduction
1 Zooming in: stylistic approaches to pop culture
Valentin Werner and Christoph Schubert
Part I: Pop fiction
2 Misdirection (re)strategizing in Robinson’s A Dedicated Man
Christiana Gregoriou
3 From pop fiction to televisual adaptation: a corpus-stylistic approach to Dead until Dark and True Blood
Rocío Montoro
Part II: Telecinematic discourse
4 Communicative and linguistic features of reality show interactions: a case study of Love Island UK
Tatyana Karpenko-Seccombe
5 Ideological stance-taking in Jane the Virgin: stylistic effects of multimodality and code-switching
Susan Reichelt
6 Suspense in film dialogue: screening Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight
Christoph Schubert
7 The art of turn-taking in movie phone call openings
Christian R. Hoffmann
Part III: Pop music and lyrics
8 The Arctic Monkeys live at the Royal Albert Hall: investigating Turner’s "lounge singer shimmer"
Lisa Jansen and Anika Gerfer
9 "Guess who’s back, back again": stylistic development in Eminem’s lyrics
Valentin Werner
Part IV: Cartoons and video games
10 New York City dialect, speech acts, and anti-blackness in Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland
Cecelia Cutler
11 The stylistic journey of a video game: a diachronic approach to multimodality in the Football Manager series
Dušan Stamenković
12 Stylistic approaches to pop culture: an afterword
Michael Toolan
Biography
Christoph Schubert is Full Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Vechta, Germany. His major research areas are stylistics, discourse studies, pragmatics, and text linguistics. His publications comprise contributions to outlets such as the Journal of Literary Semantics, Journal of Language and Politics, Discourse Studies, Journal of Pragmatics, and Text & Talk. He is author of a monograph on the linguistic constitution of space in descriptive texts (2009), co-editor of the volume Variational Text Linguistics (2016), co-author of the textbook Introduction to Discourse Studies (2018), and co-editor of a special issue of Discourse, Context & Media on cohesion in multimodal discourse (2021).
Valentin Werner is Associate Professor of English and Historical Linguistics at the University of Bamberg, Germany. His research areas comprise applied linguistics, variational linguistics, and media linguistics, as well as stylistics. In addition to papers published in journals such as Corpora, English Language & Linguistics, Linguistics, and Text & Talk, he has (co-)edited the volumes Pop Culture in Language Education: Theory, Research, Practice (Routledge, 2021), The Language of Pop Culture (Routledge, 2018), and Re-Assessing the Present Perfect (2016), as well as a special issue of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics on telecinematic language (2021).
"With its multifarious topics discussed and various methodological and stylistic approaches taken...Christoph Schubert and Valentin Werner’s volume will certainly be of much interest and inspiration to colleagues as well as students across linguistic disciplines, literary studies, media studies and cultural studies, equipping them with a range of tools for unlocking topical, multimodal and genre-specific access points to pop cultural linguistics and stylistics." - Monika Kirner-Ludwig, University of Innsbruck, English Language and Linguistics
"In all, Werner and Schubert’s new collection is a welcome addition to the growing volume of work on pop cultural linguistics and...is sure to be a popular addition to many an academic library or personal bookshelf for years to come." - Paul J. Flanagan, University of Chester, Style
"Stylistic Approaches to Pop Culture is a well-edited anthology that sheds new light on stylistic perspectives to the study of the language of pop culture. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of language and popular culture." - Joe Trotta, University of Gothenburg, Anglistik
