The use of language to create realities: The example of Good Bye, Lenin!
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Andrea DeCapua
Her research interests are applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and culture and language. Her publications include
Crossing Cultures in the Language Classroom (with A. Wintergerst, 2004); ‘Assessing and validating a learning styles instrument’ (with A. Wintergerst, 2005); ‘Woman talk revisited: Personal disclosures and alignment development’ (with D. Berkowitz and D. Boxer, 2006); and ‘The role of the literary translator in the new Europe and the literary translator as role model’ (with E. Trotter, 2006).
Abstract
Neither reality nor language is genuinely objective; rather, both the interpretation of reality and the use of language to create and manipulate reality represent a subjective understanding of both. This paper examines the role of language in creating, representing, and manipulating realities, using the 2003 German movie Good Bye, Lenin! as a vivid and striking illustration of the role of language in constructing alternate realities.
When the protagonist's mother, a committed East German socialist, awakes from the coma she entered after a heart attack on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the doctors warn her son that any shock could kill her. In order to prevent his mother from learning of the demise of her beloved socialist Germany, Alex manipulates the reality of post-wall East Berlin to match his mother's (perceived) reality of an earlier socialist East Berlin. In so doing, Alex makes the viewer question what reality is and how reality can be constructed and manufactured. There is no absolute objective reality, but only realities based upon the beliefs and preconceptions of participants, which may be and often are, manipulated by the use of language in the presentation of ‘facts.’
About the author
Her research interests are applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and culture and language. Her publications include Crossing Cultures in the Language Classroom (with A. Wintergerst, 2004); ‘Assessing and validating a learning styles instrument’ (with A. Wintergerst, 2005); ‘Woman talk revisited: Personal disclosures and alignment development’ (with D. Berkowitz and D. Boxer, 2006); and ‘The role of the literary translator in the new Europe and the literary translator as role model’ (with E. Trotter, 2006).
© Walter de Gruyter
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Articles in the same Issue
- Wounded warriors: Further explorations into a biocultural semiotics
- ‘Reloading’ movies into commercial reality: A multimodal analysis of The Matrix trilogy's promotional posters
- The use of language to create realities: The example of Good Bye, Lenin!
- The narrative semiotics of The Daily Show
- Le produit in situ : Analyse (sémiotique) d'une photographie d'Andreas Gursky 99 cent
- Semiotic systemity of visual artworks: Case study of The Holy Trinity by Rublev
- ‘What's in a picture?’ A comparison of drawings by apes and children
- ‘Aller sans mais se sentir avec’ : emplois absolus non-innocents de avec et sans
- An interview with Paul Newman
- ‘Superreader’: Riffaterre revisited
- Application d'une hypothèse de linguistique textuelle : Le génotexte
- Information, semiotics, and symbolic systems
- Assuming positions: Organizational change as mediated through metaphors
- Icon, index, symbol and denotation, connotation, metasign
- Toxic substances, semiotic forms: Towards a socio- and textual analysis of altered senses
- Playing doubles: Derrida's writing
- Paratextology
- Semiotics of space: Peirce and Lefebvre
- Gesture and language
