Protestant Discourse Research Articles

Italy: A new language for a new politics?

The aim of this article is to analyze the language used by the major actors in contemporary Italian politics. After a brief introduction, which lists the general questions posed by such an analysis, we examine the language of the pre‐1992 regime, which has been rather too hastily condemned as obscure and solipsistic. We then pass to the self‐consciously simple language of Bossi, who constructs a discourse of protest, and of Berlusconi, who offers a discourse of government. These lead to the very different, albeit sometimes complementary, languages of Prodi and D'Alema, which go beyond populism and open new political perspectives. Through these and other examples we examine the role of political language in a changing Italy.

Narratives of Women: English Feminists of the 1790s

Did ‘feminist’ writers of the 1790s produce narratives in which women could find self‐respect and authenticity? Before this ‘positive’ endeavour came the ‘negative’ task of constructing narratives revealing women’s oppression. More positive images may be found in narratives which relate women to political discourses and events. But the main type of narrative pointing the way towards authentic selfhood for women, free from the prisonhouse of gender, is the narrative of Bildung or development, so common in novels, conduct books, treatises on education and polemics. This narrative, criticized by some twentieth‐century feminists but treated sympathetically here, may be a middle‐class assertion of Kultur against decadent aristocratic Zivilisation; it is also formed by Stoic, republican and Protestant discourses, and is turned into a woman’s narrative not only by republicans such as Macaulay, Wollstonecraft and Hays but also by conservatives such as Chapone and More. It is concerned with a rich and rational inner life rather than surface appearance and superficial accomplishments, and encourages women to be self‐controlled rather than other‐determined, to some extent selves for themselves rather than for men.

Des mots pour un pays. Marqueurs lexicaux de l'écrit et de l'oral en Camargue

Martel (Claude). — A country through its words. Lexical markers in the oral and written expression of Camargue. Starting with about ten works représentative of Camargue and six interviews of inhabitants, we examine, using the vocabulary adopted by writers and witnesses, the rôle and operating mode of lexical indi-cators, markers and stéréotypés in the expression of Camarguais identity. Whether one wanders through the teeming crowd of words that assume new overtones irom one work to the next to celebrate a Camargue for eternity more mythical than real, or whether one indulges oneself in the spoken production closer to the grassroots and apparendy more trivial, one can see in its broad oudines the same picture of this country. But while written texts tend to give a more valorized vision, by insisting on the fascinating strangeness of an indefinite land between water and sait, oral productions denounce forcefully, though concisely, the most devalorizing aspects. To build the picture, the same words operate at several levels : beginning as plain describers, eveiyday words, or trade words in the local Camarguais speech, they become markers through sheer récurrence in a discourse of passionate protest and/or assessment, or through literary reshaping to eventually end up as written stéréotypés. But at every level, each in its own way, those words contribute to the expression and reconstruction of an identity for a country which thinks of itself and claims to be spécial, savage, wild, untamed, free brand. Le Monde Alpin et rhodanien, ler-2 trimestres 1993, L'identité vécue. Discours, rites, emblèmes, pp. 63 à 84.

Christianity and colonialism in South Africa

Christian evangelists were intimately involved in the colonial process in southern Africa. This essay distinguishes two dimensions of their historical role, each associated with a different form of power. In the domain of formal political processes, of the concrete exercise of power, the effect of the nonconformist mission to the Tswana, as elsewhere in Africa, was inherently ambiguous. However, in the domain of implicit signs and practices, of the diffuse control over everyday meaning, it instilled the authoritative imprint of Western capitalist culture. But there was a contradiction between these dimensions: while the mission introduced a new world view, it could not deliver the world to go with it. And this contradiction, in turn, gave rise to various discourses of protest and resistance. [South Africa, Tswana, colonialism, Christianity, missionaries, power, domination and resistance, historical agency and cultural discourse]