In my thesis, I explore and compare three films issued in the decades after the 1980s for their representation of neglected regional working-class memory – for which I use the term counter-memory...Show moreIn my thesis, I explore and compare three films issued in the decades after the 1980s for their representation of neglected regional working-class memory – for which I use the term counter-memory throughout my thesis – of Thatcher’s politics. Counter-memory presents the narratives of the people who struggle in the dominant culture. All three of the films in this corpus are directed by British filmmakers. The Commitments (1991), directed by Alan Parker, is set in Dublin, Ireland. Trainspotting (1996), directed by Danny Boyle, is set in Edinburgh, Scotland. Stephen Daldry’s Billy Elliot (2000) is set in County Durham, England. I critically examine how these films challenge or reinforce the capitalist hegemony of the 1980s and how their critique of society influences the memory of that era. Overall, I argue that the abovementioned films represent different sides of working-class counter-memory in a kaleidoscopic view of the same: counter-memory of the socio-economic effects of the political strategies in Britain and Ireland of the 1980s.Show less
Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) state that although interaction is co-operative, a person’s face can be unintentionally attacked through face-threatening acts (FTAs). Culpeper (1996) disagrees,...Show moreBrown and Levinson (1978, 1987) state that although interaction is co-operative, a person’s face can be unintentionally attacked through face-threatening acts (FTAs). Culpeper (1996) disagrees, stating that people can also intentionally attack someone’s face, and devised “impoliteness superstrategies” (pp. 356-357) that are used for this purpose. However, little research has been done on intentional impoliteness, and even less on gender and intentional impoliteness. Therefore, the research question is: do men and women use different face-threatening acts, and do they respond to these FTAs differently? I aimed to analyse adult men and women’s language, behaviour and paralinguistic features on FTAs and their responses to FTAs, focusing on the differences. This was done through analysis of a total of ten forty-minute episodes from three different reality television series: Can’t Pay? We’ll Take It Away! (n.a., 2014-2018), Supernanny (Frost, 2004-2008) and Jo Frost: Extreme Parental Guidance (Frost, 2010-2012), using a schedule based on the FTAs and impoliteness superstrategies by Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987), Culpeper (1996) and Bousfield (2008), respectively. The responses to FTAs were also recorded. Men and women seemed to use similar FTAs. However, the context in which the FTAs were spoken seemed to affect who was expressing which FTAs. A total of twelve different response types were recorded. These results can be used in different contexts (i.e. language teaching) to predict what kind of FTAs might be present in which contexts. They may also be used to add to both politeness and impoliteness theory.Show less
In film and television, actors are sometimes expected to speak in a particular accent in order to convey their character’s identity as accurately as possible. A term in sociolinguistic research...Show moreIn film and television, actors are sometimes expected to speak in a particular accent in order to convey their character’s identity as accurately as possible. A term in sociolinguistic research fields that describes this connection between identity and language is indexicality: it “refers to the way an observable linguistic fact can be indexical of social identities in the same way, for instance, that clothing can. Language features can thus be semiotic signs associated with such identities.” (Smakman 2018: 57). Filmmakers make use of this fact when they include a specific dialect in their films: “film uses language variation and accent to draw character quickly, building on established preconceived notions associated with specific loyalties, ethnic, racial or economic alliances” (Lippi-Green 1997: 81). However, as the actors in film may be required to speak in an accent that is different than their own, inaccuracies can occur in their pronunciation, which may lead to linguistic stereotyping, appropriation or even racism. In this thesis, I examined this phenomenon in relation to the Birmingham (or, ‘Brummie’) accent, which is spoken in the series Peaky Blinders. I first established the most prototypical accent features of the Birmingham accent by comparing several sources, after which I analysed the use of these features in the speech of native speakers and actors. I then juxtaposed the differences in frequency and consistency between the pronunciation of the native speakers and actors, and several patterns emerged. These patterns could all be related to four sociophonetic processes detected by Bell and Gibson in a similar study: selectivity, mis-realisation, overshoot and undershoot (2011: 568). It was then found that these sociophonetic processes can account for the inaccuracies that may occur in actors’ accent use, which ultimately pointed out that there is, in fact, a correlation between dialect use in film and linguistic stereotyping.Show less
The art of sympathy constitutes an essential element in George Eliot’s concept of authorship. Regarding her novel The Mill on the Floss (1860), this thesis examines the function of imagination and...Show moreThe art of sympathy constitutes an essential element in George Eliot’s concept of authorship. Regarding her novel The Mill on the Floss (1860), this thesis examines the function of imagination and how George Eliot seeks to develop this function within the realm of the realist novel. The thesis starts with describing Eliot's view on the art of sympathy influenced by e.g. Feuerbach's concept of double-consciousness and Hazlitt’s discussion of Shakespearean sympathy and how she thinks it should be applied to the realist novel. A second section proposes a new reading of The Mill on the Floss based on one of Bakhtin’s theories, as explicated in his essay Discourse in the Novel (1975). This is done to distinguish the narrator's voice from George Eliot's own voice and to examine what Eliot implies with the narrator’s different shifts (and inconsistencies). The next two sections present the narrator and the difficulties he has when telling the story of Maggie Tulliver. First, the thesis discusses the difficulty the narrator is faced with when he discovers that Maggie's characteristics and circumstances go beyond his scientific comprehension of life. Second, the thesis illustrates that when seeking the audience's sympathy for his character Maggie, the narrator is confronted with the inaptness of the contemporary literary conventions to do so. These last two sections give insights on how Eliot both explores and expresses the limits of its omniscient narrator’s knowledge and style, and experiments with how she can replace it with the ‘art of sympathy’.Show less
