Nation and globalization as social interaction: Interdiscursivity of discourse and semiosis in the 2008 Beijing Olympics' opening ceremony
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Juan Li
Juan Li (b. 1973) is an associate professor of English at the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota, USA) 〈jli3@stthomas.edu〉. Her research interests include critical discourse theory and analysis, social semiotics, and media discourse. Her publications include “Collision of language in news discourse: A functional-cognitive perspective of transitivity” (2011); and “Transitivity and lexical cohesion: Press representations of a political disaster and its actors” (2010).
Abstract
Using the social semiotic theory developed out of the intersections of functional linguistics and studies of discourse and discursive practices, this paper analyzes how the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics Games constructs understandings of Chinese nationalism and globalization in its chronological and unifying narrative of the Chinese history and modernity. Focusing on interdiscursivity of semiosis and discourses circulating in the ceremony, the analysis demonstrates that the ceremony was engaged in a process of constant negotiations and reconciliations between history and modernity, between the local and the global, and between Chinese cultural values and universal Olympic ideals. These negotiations and recontextualizations presented a vision of Chinese history and nationhood that was intertwined with globalization, constructing globalization as both a historical condition in China as well as a global concern that was both rooted in and extended the immediate Chinese national context. This view of the nation and globalization can be explained with the social semiotic theory, whose emphasis on dialogism supports a generative understanding of the nation and globalization in the context of the Olympics. Teaming the study of the nation with the social semiotic theory allows us to establish invaluable contexts for knowledge of the nation that the social semiotic theory can help us extract from semiosis.
About the author
Juan Li (b. 1973) is an associate professor of English at the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota, USA) 〈jli3@stthomas.edu〉. Her research interests include critical discourse theory and analysis, social semiotics, and media discourse. Her publications include “Collision of language in news discourse: A functional-cognitive perspective of transitivity” (2011); and “Transitivity and lexical cohesion: Press representations of a political disaster and its actors” (2010).
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- A semiotic model of visual perception
- Art, science, and value as found in Peirce's ten trichotomies
- Reforming visual semiotics: The dynamic approach
- An early semiotic
- “Language as calculus” in Beckett's writing: A new perspective on Beckett's conception of language
- Media representations of science, andimplications for neuroscience and semiotics
- Ubiquitous but arbitrary iconicity
- Nation and globalization as social interaction: Interdiscursivity of discourse and semiosis in the 2008 Beijing Olympics' opening ceremony
- Documentary evidence as hegemonic reconstruction
- Semiotic resources of music notation: Towards a multimodal analysis of musical notation in student texts
- The semiotics of undesirable bodies: Transnationalism, race culture, abjection
- A socio-semiotic framework for the analysis of exhibits in a science museum
- Indefinite identity: The masked terrorist as iconic legisign
- The segmentation of phenomenological space in Licheń as an example of double binds
- Wine labels in Austrian food retail stores: A semiotic analysis of multimodal red wine labels
- Exploring the rhetorical semiotic brand image structure of ad films with multivariate mapping techniques
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- A semiotic model of visual perception
- Art, science, and value as found in Peirce's ten trichotomies
- Reforming visual semiotics: The dynamic approach
- An early semiotic
- “Language as calculus” in Beckett's writing: A new perspective on Beckett's conception of language
- Media representations of science, andimplications for neuroscience and semiotics
- Ubiquitous but arbitrary iconicity
- Nation and globalization as social interaction: Interdiscursivity of discourse and semiosis in the 2008 Beijing Olympics' opening ceremony
- Documentary evidence as hegemonic reconstruction
- Semiotic resources of music notation: Towards a multimodal analysis of musical notation in student texts
- The semiotics of undesirable bodies: Transnationalism, race culture, abjection
- A socio-semiotic framework for the analysis of exhibits in a science museum
- Indefinite identity: The masked terrorist as iconic legisign
- The segmentation of phenomenological space in Licheń as an example of double binds
- Wine labels in Austrian food retail stores: A semiotic analysis of multimodal red wine labels
- Exploring the rhetorical semiotic brand image structure of ad films with multivariate mapping techniques
