Call for Papers

Anglistica AION. An Interdisciplinary Journal

Call for Papers

 “In the tide of times”: Continuity and Change in Screen Shakespeare(s)
Editors: Sylvaine Bataille, Université de Rouen Normandie, sylvaine.bataillebrennetot@univ-rouen.fr and Victoria Bladen, University of Queensland, victoria.bladen@uqconnect.edu.au

Shakespeare has been present on screens for more than 120 years, from the 1899 silent film King John to recent films like Joel Coen’s 2021 Macbeth, the 2018 spin-off Ophelia or Netflix’s 2019 The King. From “box office poison” to “mass-market Shakespeare film”, from “new wave Shakespeare” to a “post-‘Shakespearean-blockbuster’ phase” (L.B. Mayer cited by Lanier, 2002; Lanier, 2002; Cartelli and Rowe, 2007; Hatchuel and Vienne-Guerrin, 2017), the history of Shakespeare on screen has been one of shifts and transformations, as well as endurance and citation. Times and technologies change, generations of directors and viewers succeed each other, but filmmakers continue to be drawn to Shakespeare and find his plays relevant to our world. New versions reinvent previous films (for instance, Spielberg’s 2021 West Side Story) or use similar adaptational strategies, while the resurgence of black-and-white (in Joss Whedon’s 2012 Much Ado About Nothing and in Joel Coen’s 2021 Macbeth), as well as the pandemic-related revival of the filmed theatre subgenre (available on streaming platforms such as Globe Player or National Theatre Home), seem to take us back to the beginnings of Shakespeare on film.  

This special issue will provide an opportunity to ask where we are in Shakespeare on screen and in screen Shakespeare studies today. We invite papers on: 

  • the extent of the renewal brought by recent Shakespearean screen productions: are we currently witnessing a new “wave” of Shakespeare films or is this notion no longer relevant given today’s media context of fragmentation, niche production and Internet streaming?
  • Experimentation/innovation and tradition: how do film/TV/digital Shakespearean productions deal with the traditions established by previous screen interpretations and more broadly with cinematic genre conventions? At what point do innovations turn into conventions which can then lend themselves to parody? 
  • Screen Shakespeares in a changing world and in times of crisis: between resistance to change, escapism or nostalgia and a meaningful dialogue with the historical moment; and
  • Any other interpretations of the theme of ‘continuity and change’ in Shakespeare on screen. 

We welcome submissions from authors working in the field of Shakespeare and adaptation who would like to be considered for inclusion in the volume.

Please submit your 300-word abstract along with a short biography to  both editors and CC anglistica@unior.it . 

Deadline for abstracts: 1 December 2023
Notification of acceptance:  20 December 2023
Deadline for completed articles: 31 March 2024
 

The articles submitted must comply with the guidelines and a template that can be downloaded from the journal's website.

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Persuasion in Religious Discourse
Editors: Aoife Beville (University of Naples L'Orientale, abeville@unior.it) and Stephen Pihlaja (Aston University, s.pihlaja@aston.ac.uk) 

Religious discourse, understood in a broad, functional sense (Harrison 2006; Hobbs 2021; Pihlaja 2021) often has a persuasive dimension. Indeed, certain kinds of texts are immediately recognisable as explicit argumentation: Da’wa, evangelism, apologetics or similar. However, persuasive strategies may also be revealed in appeals for almsgiving and financial donations, calls to social action, instructions for devotional practices or ethical choices, and so forth.

Persuasion, in linguistic terms, is not an inherently negative concept, despite the unpleasant connotations that it may evoke; it is, rather, “a legitimate function of argumentation” (Walton 2007, 46). Persuasion, therefore, is understood here as a kind of speech act (Austin 1962) which, prototypically, produces the perlocutionary effect of influencing the audience’s belief or actions.

‘Persuasion in Religious Discourse’ will be a special issue for Anglistica AION. An Interdisciplinary Journal. The issue aims to account for the forms and functions of persuasion in religious discourse. It, therefore, responds to “the perennial need for individuals and groups to be aware of the persuasive practices they use, or that are used upon them to produce or alter their beliefs and actions” (Fahnestock and Harris 2022, 1). 

We invite analyses of patterns and practices of persuasion in a variety of religious discourses (meditative and sermon texts; hadiths; interpersonal discourse; representation of religion in fictional texts; social media and online discourse, etc.). ‘Religious’, here, refers to minority religions, world religions such as Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, and others, or to closely related concepts such as New Age spirituality, New Atheism, and mysticism. Diachronic and comparative approaches which further broaden these horizons are welcome. Furthermore, religious language may function as a stylistic device intended to persuade within other forms of discourse – Hobbs (2021) notes its use in media, advertising, politics, and popular culture. 

Such analyses will serve to illuminate the rhetorical practices which constitute religious discourse and, which, in turn, construct religious, social, and cultural identities. 

Possible methods of inquiry may include, but are not limited to:

  • Rhetoric and argumentation studies
  • Stylistics
  • Conversation Analysis
  • Discourse Analysis 
  • Pragmatics
  • Anthropological, ethnomethodological and linguistic approaches to religious studies
  • Historical linguistics
  • Corpus linguistics

Please submit abstracts (300wds; max. 5 keywords; max. 5 references) along with a short biography to both editors and cc anglistica@unior.it.

Deadline for abstracts - 30th November 2023
Notification of acceptance – 20th December 2023
Deadline for completed articles - 31st March 2024

 

References:

Adam, Martin. 2017. ‘Persuasion in Religious Discourse: Enhancing Credibility in Sermon Titles and Openings’. Discourse and Interaction 10 (2): 5–25. https://doi.org/10.5817/DI2017-2-5. 

Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books.

Crystal, David. 2018. ‘Whatever Happened to Theolinguistics?’ In Religion, Language, and the Human Mind, edited by Paul Chilton and Monika Kopytowska, Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190636647.003.0001.

Fahnestock, Jeanne. 2011. Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fahnestock, Jeanne, and Randy Allen Harris, eds. 2022. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Persuasion. New York: Routledge.

Harris, Randy Allen, and Jeanne Fahnestock. 2022. ‘Rhetoric, Linguistics, and the Study of Persuasion’. In The Routledge Handbook of Language and PersuaHarsion, edited by Jeanne Fahnestock and Randy Allen Harris, 1–24. New York: Routledge.

Harrison, Victoria S. 2006. ‘The Pragmatics of Defining Religion in a Multi-Cultural World’. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 59 (3): 133–52.

Hobbs, Valerie. 2021. An Introduction to Religious Language: Exploring Theolinguistics in Contemporary Contexts. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Jeffries, Lesley, and Dan McIntyre. 2010. Stylistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Keane, Webb. 1997. ‘Religious Language’. Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1): 47–71. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.26.1.47.

Keane, Webb. 2005. ‘Language and Religion’. In A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, 431–48. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470996522.ch19.

Leech, Geoffrey. 2008. Language in Literature: Style and Foregrounding. New York: Pearson Longman.

Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pihlaja, Stephen. 2018. Religious Talk Online: The Evangelical Discourse of Muslims, Christians and Atheists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pihlaja, Stephen. ed. 2021. Analysing Religious Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Searle, John R. 1975. Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Walton, Douglas, ed. 2007. ‘The Speech Act of Persuasion’. In Media Argumentation: Dialectic, Persuasion and Rhetoric, 46–90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511619311.003. 

Wuthnow, Robert J. 2011. ‘Taking Talk Seriously: Religious Discourse as Social Practice’. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 50 (1): 1–21.

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Climate Change Discourse: Re-mediation and Re-contextualisation in News and Social Media
Editors: Katherine E. Russo (university of Naples L'Orientale; kerusso@unior.it) and Cinzia Bevitori (University of Bologna; cinzia.bevitori@unibo.it)

Numerous scholars have pointed out that citizens’ awareness, attitudes and actions towards climate change are shaped by mediated information (Bevitori, 2011, 2014; Boycoff and Boycoff, 2004; Carvalho and Burgess, 2005; Russo 2018; Russo and Wodak 2017). News media play an important role in the popularization of climate science and scientific evaluations of climate-related risks. In order to make risk decisions, citizens seek information, which is increasingly circulated through online news media, and later re-mediated in social media, such as facebook and twitter, or face-to-face conversations. Yet, when climate-change discourse is re-mediated, its recontextualisation redefines the meaning assigned to climate change terminology and discourse due to the influence of news values such as negativity, personalization, impact, superlativeness, novelty, and expectation (Bednarek 2006, 2008). For instance, certain events, such as environmental disasters or announcements by prominent scientist or politicians, fulfil news values more than others (Bell, 1991; Fowler, 1991; van Dijk, 1988). Yet, as Bednarek and Caple note (2012, p. 44; 2017, p. 79), news values and newsworthiness should be conceptualized in terms of how events or propositions are construed through discourse. In their opinion, “newsworthiness is not inherent in events but established through language and image” (Bednarek and Caple, 2012, pp. 41). Indeed, the discourse of climate change has changed over time in order to avoid editorial fatigue and satisfy news values (Boycoff and Boycoff, 2007; Carvalho and Burgess, 2005; Bevitori, 2011).

We invite critical, theoretical and discourse-analytical articles investigating different genres operating in the context of “old and new” media.

Possible areas of inquiry may include, but are not limited to:

-Critical Discourse Analysis Studies

-Integrated Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Studies Approaches

-Integrated Corpus Linguistics and Appraisal Linguistics Approaches

- Media and Communication Studies

- Comparative Studies

- Rhetorics and Stylistics Studies

Deadline for abstracts:

Please send 200/250 words abstracts directly to co-editors and CC anglistica@unior.it by 15 December 2022.

Notification of acceptance: 15 January 2022

Deadline for completed articles: 30 March 2022

References:

Bednarek, M. Evaluation in Media Discourse: Analysis of a Newspaper Corpus. London and New York: Continuum, 2006.
Bednarek, M. Emotion Talk across Corpora. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Bednarek, M. and H. Caple. News Discourse. London: Continuum, 2012.
Bednarek, M. and H. Caple. The Discourse of News Values: How News Organizations Create Newsworthiness. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Bell, A. The Languages of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
Bevitori, C. “’Imagine, If You Will.’ Reader Positioning on Climate Change in US Op-Ed Articles”. In G. Di Martino, L. Lombardo, and S. Nuccorini (Eds), Challenges for the 21st Century: Dilemmas, Ambiguities, Directions, Roma: Edizioni Q, 2011. pp. 367-76.
Bevitori, C. “Values, Assumptions and Beliefs in British Newspaper Editorial Coverage of Climate Change”. In C. Hart and P. Cap (Eds), Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. pp. 603-626.
Boycoff, M., and J. Boycoff. “Balance as Bias: Global Warming and the U.S Prestige Press”. Global Environmental Change. 2004.14 (2): 125-126.
Carvalho, A. and J. Burgess. “Cultural Circuits of Climate Change in U.K. Broadsheeet Newspapers”, 1985-2005. Risk Analysis. 2005. 25 (6): 1457-1469.
Fowler, Roger. Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.
Russo, Katherine E., 2018. The Evaluation of Risk in Institutional and Newspaper Discourse: The Case of Climate Change and Migration, ESI, Napoli, 2018.
Russo Katherine E. and Ruth Wodak, eds., Special Issue “The Representation of ‘Exceptional Migrants’ in Media Discourse: The Case of Climate-induced Migration”, Anglistica AION: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 21.2 (2017).
Van Dijk, Teun A. News as Discourse. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1988.