Media Intertextualities

This collection of critical essays, originally published in Pragmatics and Society 1:2 (2010), discusses how normative biases that shape our relation to the world are constructed through discursive practice in media discourse. The intertextual perspective it adopts is crucial for our understanding of how media representations of speakers and languages shape many of our preconceptions of others. Mediatization is inherently intertextual; the very nature of this process involves extracting the speech behavior of particular speakers or groups from a highly specific context and refracting and reshaping it to be inserted in another stream of representation. The notion of intertextuality becomes a useful concept for the linguistic anthropological study of media discourse in the context of modernity, as it provides us with a tool for exploring the semiotic processes that underlie the way in which the media negotiate and reinscribe the complex relationships of identity that characterize late modern subjecthood.

Alexandra Jaffe, California State University at Long Beach:
This volume is an important contribution to the study of the processes of media circulation, entextualization and reentextualization of sociolinguistic and semiotic material. The case studies and commentaries show how these processes contribute to the production and reproduction of dominant and alternative ideologies related to the indexical connections between linguistic signs and social categories and personae.