4 - Dialogism and voice
from Part One - Key issues in analysing media discourse
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
Summary
This chapter explores media discourse using the concept of dialogism, or intertextuality. This means conceiving of a media text as a tissue of voices and traces of other texts; when we engage with it we go into dialogue with them. In studying media texts, we need to be aware that they are dialogic, or embedded in a mesh of intertextuality:
When we look at the communications that emanate from mass media, we see that, like most other forms of speaking, they are preceded and succeeded by numerous other dialogues and pieces of language that both implicate themand render them interpretable. Such is the social life of language … indexically linked to past and future speech events.
(Spitulnik 1997: 161–2)Part of its appeal as a conceptual framework ‘is that it enables us to think of media discourse as being qualitatively continuous with the experience of everyday life’ (Meinhof and Smith 1995a: 3).
Intertextuality is about interconnections. Starting with its most obvious examples, a Desperate housewives instalment that begins ‘Previously on Desperate Housewives…’ is connecting back to the previous episode alluded to. Similarly, speech reportage (for example, indirect speech: ‘Zac said you kidnapped his father so you could kill him’) involves explicit signalling of one utterance inserted into another (in this case, the voice of Zac into another's). There are also intertextual connections of less obvious, foregrounded kinds.
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- Information
- Media DiscourseRepresentation and Interaction, pp. 63 - 80Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007