Stylistic Approaches to Pop Culture

<p>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.</p> <p>Introduction</p><p>1 Zooming in: stylistic approaches to pop culture</p><p>Valentin Werner and Christoph Schubert </p><p>Part I: Pop fiction</p><p>2 Misdirection (re)strategizing in Robinson’s <i>A Dedicated Man</i><br><i>Christiana Gregoriou </i></p><p>3 From pop fiction to televisual adaptation: a corpus-stylistic approach to <i>Dead until Dark</i> and <i>True Blood<br>Rocío Montoro </i></p><p>Part II: Telecinematic discourse</p><p>4 Communicative and linguistic features of reality show interactions: a case study of <i>Love Island UK</i><br><i>Tatyana Karpenko-Seccombe </i></p><p>5 Ideological stance-taking in <i>Jane the Virgin</i>: stylistic effects of multimodality and code-switching<i>Susan Reichelt </i></p><p>6 Suspense in film dialogue: screening Quentin Tarantino’s <i>The Hateful Eight</i><br><i>Christoph Schubert </i></p><p>7 The art of turn-taking in movie phone call openings<i>Christian R. Hoffmann </i></p><p>Part III: Pop music and lyrics</p><p>8 The Arctic Monkeys live at the Royal Albert Hall: investigating Turner’s "lounge singer shimmer"<br><i>Lisa Jansen and Anika Gerfer </i></p><p>9 "Guess who’s back, back again": stylistic development in Eminem’s lyrics<br><i>Valentin Werner </i></p><p>Part IV: Cartoons and video games</p><p>10 New York City dialect, speech acts, and anti-blackness in Winsor McCay’s <i>Little Nemo in Slumberland</i><br><i>Cecelia Cutler </i></p><p>11 The stylistic journey of a video game: a diachronic approach to multimodality in the <i>Football Manager</i> series<br><i>Dušan Stamenković </i></p><p>12 Stylistic approaches to pop culture: an afterword</p><p><i>Michael Toolan </i></p>