Powerful Text Research Articles

Analysis of Van Dijk's Critical Discourse on the Lyrics of the Song "Komang" by Raim Laode

Background. Van Dijk's critical discourse analysis is an approach used to uncover the power of ideology and power in texts. The lyrics of the song "Komang" by Raim Laode are the object of study because they contain social and cultural messages that are relevant to today's society. Purpose. This study aims to analyze how the lyrics of the song "Komang" reflect the strength of ideology and power structure in society through Van Dijk's critical discourse analysis approach. The specific purpose of this study is to understand the hidden meaning and social context presented in the lyrics of the song. Method. The research method used is the analysis of Van Dijk's critical discourse, which involves three main dimensions: text, social cognition, and social context. The data was collected through the analysis of the lyrics of the song "Komang" with a focus on the text structure, rhetorical strategy, and socio-cultural context that influenced it. Results. The results of the analysis show that the lyrics of the song "Komang" contain social criticism of injustice and inequality in society. Through the use of poetic and symbolic language, Raim Laode succeeded in conveying important messages about struggle and hope. The lyrics also reflect the ideology of resistance to oppressive power structures. Conclusion. The lyrics of Raim Laode's song "Komang" are not just a work of art, but also a form of strong social criticism. Van Dijk's critical discourse analysis reveals that the lyrics are loaded with ideological meanings and criticisms of social injustice. This research provides insight into how music can be an effective medium to voice social issues and influence people's thinking.

Why Robert Scholes's Utopian Vision Did Not Become Reality, and How to Make It Happen

Why Robert Scholes's Utopian Vision Did Not Become Reality, and How to Make It Happen

Super Schoolmaster: Ezra Pound as Teacher, Then and Now by Robert Scholes and David Ben-Merre

Reviewed by: Super Schoolmaster: Ezra Pound as Teacher, Then and Now by Robert Scholes and David Ben-Merre K. Narayana Chandran Super Schoolmaster: Ezra Pound as Teacher, Then and Now. Robert Scholes and David Ben-Merre. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021. Pp. 221. $32.95 (paper). Ezra Pound's compulsive streak as a teacher was so well-known that those who loved him and his fierce devotion to epic heritage, loved him most of all for his teaching. "He could not keep himself from teaching. In one way or another he was always teaching," concluded James Laughlin in his Pound as Wuz: Essays and Lectures on Ezra Pound.1 Given this, a monograph on "Ezra Pound as Teacher, Then and Now" was perhaps long overdue, and Robert Scholes and David Ben-Merre have given us one. As they tell us, "Super Schoolmaster" was what The Dial reviewer of Pound's Instigations (1920) had called him. That review noted Pound's insistence that good schooling led students to an enabling comparative perspective on the arts and literature of any country or period. Scholes and Ben-Merre urge us to reread Pound's miscellaneous prose at the present time, as we continue to worry about threats to humanities education the world over. While Pound always remained outside the academy as an unassimilable and aggressive stranger, he was wholly committed to reforming English pedagogy, hoping to bring about an American risorgimento in the arts in general—a project that he believed would be possible only by teaching young people how to read, and how to write. He was probably the first poet in English to insist on what we now call "cultural literacy" for readers who, according to him, would be better served by an understanding of what constitutes literary art, what socioeconomic factors determine the quality and affect of what one reads as literature. A keen learner and amateur theorist of socioeconomic compulsions that made his version of cultural literacy necessary in such books as How to Read, ABC of Economics, ABC of Reading, and Guide to Kulchur, Pound knew more than any one of his contemporaries how the literary marketplace made and unmade literary artists, and what struggles writers had to go through in getting noticed. As the authors of Super Schoolmaster note in their introduction, Pound's "unwavering advocacy for 'comparative' methods in education heralds the rise in academia of interdisciplinary programs and collaborative fields today" (4). In short, this short book harvests rich material evidence and bibliographical pointers to the fact that Pound was both willing to learn and always eager to share what he learnt by showing how American institutions of learning in his time shortchanged young minds, or neglected avid learners. The authors of this book combine the strengths of fair judgment and forthright criticism in the right measure. Scholes, who died in 2016 and did not live to see his book published, was himself a distinguished teacher and collaborator in modernist projects. As the author of such studies as Paradoxy of Modernism (2006) and Modernism in the Magazines (2010), students of modernism will know him as a pioneer of the Brown Modernist Journals Project (1995–2012) as well as for his distinguished work on English teachers and humanities classrooms in his Textual Power (1985) and The Rise and Fall of English (1998). In his short "Preface" to this book, Scholes remarks how influential Pound has been in shaping his own scholarly mission and pedagogic thinking. Ben-Merre's "Afterword" recalls how his tutelage under Scholes convinced him of the pedagogical imperative in aligning Pound, modernism, and higher education. That education alone, they both believe, will introduce young students to a world so different from the one in which they live, and think they know. Organized thematically, the five chapters of this book offer a decent pedagogic profile of Pound through fifty-odd years. Chapter one carries details of his early life as a disgruntled learner and teacher of English in American colleges. While Pound wanted to study, it would seem that he wanted to learn only what he chose and only on his terms. His difficulties had to do with the effeteness, as...

Dissent by Design: A Multimodal Study of 2019 Women’s March MY Protest Signs

The power of texts and visuals in the repertoire of protests – in both its production and consumption – allows protest movements to not only spread their message faster and mobilise support, but also promote active engagement in the public sphere. The present study examined multimodal discourse of protest by analysing textual and visual resources in protest signs used to express and negotiate feminist ideology at the 2019 Women’s March MY in Kuala Lumpur. Following Kress & van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar (2006) and van Leeuwen’s Social Actor Network (2008), three themes of the march were selected for multimodal analysis. Findings of the study show that multimodal representations through verbal and visual resources vary in its salience across different themes – where some protest signs lean more towards texts in conveying its messages with minimal visuals, others show a higher reliance on textual and visual convergence to convey meaning as well as to bait the attention of readers. Weighing in on the Malaysian feminist discourse, this study puts forth the potential of multimodal strategies through verbal and visual resources in conveying feminist messages and negotiating social change through the act of protest.

Slavery, Federalism and the Textual Power for the General Welfare

Slavery, Federalism and the Textual Power for the General Welfare

Power in Text: Implementing Networks and Institutional Complexity in American Law

How should social scientists measure institutional complexity? Formal (textually defined) institutional design—and particularly the complexity of formal institutions—is an important object of study across political science, law, and public administration. However, because of measurement constraints, existing work on formal institutional design focuses either on single policy areas or “important” legislation, creating clear selection problems. In this article, I propose and validate a novel natural language processing approach designed to extract networks of institutional relationships from legal texts scalably. These “implementing networks” offer a straightforward way to represent the institutional content of law and naturally suggest measures for quantities like institutional complexity. I then apply this method to measure institutional complexity in all American laws enacted from 1993 to 2014. This approach reveals a surprising disconnect between partisan disagreement and institutional complexity among lower-profile legislation, which would have been difficult to detect without this approach.

Legal Imagination, the Power of Texts and some Hidden Contexts

Legal Imagination, the Power of Texts and some Hidden Contexts

Legal Imagination, the Power of Texts and some Hidden Contexts

Legal Imagination, the Power of Texts and some Hidden Contexts

The Persistence of Genre

Research Article| December 01 2020 The Persistence of Genre Kenneth W. Warren Kenneth W. Warren Kenneth W. Warren is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is What Was African American Literature? (2011). He is also editor, with Tess Chakkalakal, of Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs (2013). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Modern Language Quarterly (2020) 81 (4): 567–577. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-8637976 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Kenneth W. Warren; The Persistence of Genre. Modern Language Quarterly 1 December 2020; 81 (4): 567–577. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-8637976 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsModern Language Quarterly Search Advanced Search Many times over the course of what is beginning to feel like a quite lengthy teaching career, I have introduced students to the idea of genre by citing the definition that the late Robert Scholes provided in his brief but redoubtable book, Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. Genre, according to Scholes (1985: 2), refers to things regularly done and style to a regular way of doing things. In painting, landscape is a genre and impressionism is a style. Genres are social and durable; they persist through changes of style. A style is more local, often personal, as when we speak of Shakespearean comedy as opposed to Jonsonian comedy or Monet’s impressionism as opposed to Renoir’s. Both genres and styles, however, manifest themselves in recurrent patterns or codes that can be constructed by analyzing a set... Copyright © 2020 by University of Washington2020 You do not currently have access to this content.

Intermedial Performativity: Mo Yan's Red Sorghum on Page, Screen, and In-Between

Abstract Intermedial performativity refers to what happens to the performative power of text when it travels from one medium to another, and what effects the mixing or interactions of different media bring about to the texts involved. Here, “text” is used broadly, not just literary texts, but also texts in other kinds of media forms, such as film and TV. In this paper, Red Sorghum, both a novel written by Mo Yan, a Chinese Nobel Laureate, and a namesake film directed by Zhang Yimou, one of the leading Chinese fifth-generation film directors, will be closely analyzed from the perspective of intermedial performativity. The following questions will be mainly addressed: How did the ritualistic acts or signs in the novel get transmitted and transformed in the film adaptation? What kind of visual elements did the film borrow from the novel and then appropriate to achieve great effects? In what ways did Red Sorghum on both page and screen reflect or even contribute to the counterculture movements in the mid- to late 1980s China, which is in many ways similar to the 1960s in the United States and Europe in terms of cultural radicalism?

Text, process, discourse: doing feminist text analysis in institutional ethnography

ABSTRACT Institutional ethnography (IE) is a feminist approach to research focusing on the organising power of texts and language. This paper explores how to analyse texts in IE while considering the importance of reflexivity and accountability to feminist research. Based on a five year study of UK university audit processes, I developed a three-part IE text analysis approach which sits on a spectrum of closeness to the text(s) under analysis: (i) text – close analysis of one text or a small array of texts; (ii) process – mapping across a textually-mediated process and (iii) discourse – identifying a textually mediated discourse. Additionally, I make three analytic points about how texts organise: the importance of reader interpretation (researchers and users of texts); the strategic multi-layered translation work done by readers to fit into institutions and anticipate readerships; and, the importance of non-readers who can make mythologised understandings of texts material through writing future texts.

Religion as an ideological weapon and the feminisation of culture in Nigeria: a critical analysis of the textuality of violence through the legal regulation of child marriages

ABSTRACT The problem of child marriages has been discussed at length. Some authors have analysed the Nigerian legal framework to provide appropriate strategies for addressing this problem. Building on the important foundational works of these authors, my paper analyses this problem from a different perspective by focusing on the ideological foundations for the increased perpetration of child marriages. I use institutional ethnography, a feminist socio-legal methodology by Dorothy Smith to show that the problem of cultural violence against girls, as seen in the practice of child marriages, is not in the culture but in the manner in which the social, political and legal environment is developed to only meet the needs of the dominant class. This methodology requires conducting an empirical investigation, which goes beyond the limits of this paper. For now, I use the tool of textuality adopted by Smith to reveal the organising power of texts and make visible how activities in local settings are coordinated and managed extra-locally. The paper focuses on the actions of those acting within the institutional process and shows how the ruling relations in Nigeria as a whole, and more specifically the Northern region, both rely on and determine the girl child's everyday experience.

Человек в цифровом обществе: объяснительный потенциал одной социально-психологической теории

Technology has become ubiquitous, and without it it is hardly possible to imagine everyday human life. As a result of their active use, the individual feels as if he is an important participant in various processes taking place in a globalized world. The purpose of this theoretical and analytical study is to analyze the potential of the social representations theory to study the transformations that occur to a person in a digital society. Theory makes it possible to answer the question of how a person builds an explanation for a new phenomenon and builds his behavior in accordance with it. The modern era is an era of visual culture, where the power of texts (which corresponded to the generation of parents) was replaced by the power of pictures (at the level of the adolescents and young people). This feature can be viewed through the prism of the ideas of this theory, speaking of figurative and linguistic rhetorics. Finally, the theory of social representations allows us to articulate the processes of communication, social representations, and explain how the latter regulate social behavior and social relations in the digital society.

Who’s Afraid of Historicizing? How Protestant Anti-historicism Became Literary Self-Defense

Recent calls for literary critics to return to form and affect have faulted historicist methods for denying textual alterity. Historicism was likewise cast as a tool for denying textual power in the course of Protestant debates about Bible reading in the late nineteenth century. This essay tracks the charge of historicist narcissism as a constitutive link between sacred and secular reading practices from then to now. It describes a shared project, carried on by literary studies and theology alike, of protecting free agency from the felt threat of historicist determinism. But by reexamining the theological counterargument for a historicism that enhanced, not diminished, a reader’s encounter with divine alterity, the essay also demonstrates that historicism is not always secularizing. The point is not to argue for a more thoroughly secular mode of historicism, nor to expose the religiosity at the heart of literary studies. The point is to articulate an ideal of historically embedded alterity that can stand as a professional value worth defending.

The Power of Text: Measuring Sentiment in Financial Markets

The Power of Text: Measuring Sentiment in Financial Markets

Mark My Words: The Power of Text in Art

Mark My Words:The Power of Text in Art Kristine Somerville Click for larger view View full resolution Lesley Dill, Heaven/Hell Dress from Hell Hell Hell/Heaven Heaven Heaven: Encountering Sister Gertrude Morgan and Revelation, assorted fabric, 2010, courtesy of the artist [End Page 57] Click for larger view View full resolution Niki Hare, Not So Sure, acrylic on canvas, 2014, courtesy of the artist Language has simultaneously assumed the dual roles of word and images. —Edward Ruscha, American Pop artist One afternoon while I was biking with my husband in Montreal, headed to the botanical gardens, he stopped so abruptly that I hit the back of his tire. "Look," he said, pointing to the word "nervous" spray-painted in black spiky letters on the side of a brick wall of a shabby apartment building. He took several pictures of the image, which to him suggested the feel of the neighborhood. The moment inspired me to watch out for meaningful words and phrases marking the urban landscapes that may capture the spirit of the place or times or may be merely amusing. In the Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans, I found scrawled on the side of a shotgun shack "Don't Muddy the Waters, Mississippi" and farther on down the street on a sagging wooden fence the loopy lettered phrase "Cast out of the Asylum." In New York, "Life Is Beautiful." In Toronto, "Hack Work" and "Gay for Pay," and in Vancouver, "Heartbreak Makes Me Horny." At first glance these inscriptions can seem intrusive, more appropriately scribbled in a journal than inscribed on buildings, highway overpasses, or train cars. Yet they are declarations of worry, [End Page 58] frustration, and occasionally joy that add a new dimension to the way one experiences a city. Some may be evocative of stories, but in the end, the texts stand by themselves, untethered from story, demonstrating the power of words alone. Click for larger view View full resolution Niki Hare, Just Don't Forget to Come Back, mixed media on canvas, 2013, courtesy of the artist The use of language in visual art has a long history, but to understand today's language-based art, the avant-garde movement of the early twentieth century offers a starting point. Aligning himself with Dadaism, Marcel Duchamp deliberately challenged the traditional ideas of what constitutes art by questioning both subject and form. He broke with the convention of holding a mirror to nature and capturing its reflection on canvas. The painter's brush is simply unable to reproduce the vision of the eye and the imagination. Too much is lost in translation. He also rejected [End Page 59] the need in art for elevated themes from history, religion, literature, and mythology. He advocated a different kind of experience that substituted concept for mimesis. In part, he offered the authoritative nature of words as a truer source of art. Embedded in language is the power to control and influence as well as inspire, often more directly and convincingly than pictures. Words without visual accompaniment demanded a different viewing strategy—reading language as text and as image. Whether as social commentary, hard-edged phrases, terse statements, or text with no context, words in art could themselves be an aesthetic experience, commanding the same power and substance as images. Click for larger view View full resolution John James Anderson, A Smile in Every Bite, Digital Print, 2013, courtesy Adah Rose Gallery Inspired by Duchamp, who called for liberation from more traditional European aesthetics, the Pop art movement of the late 1950s accelerated and intensified an engagement with the textual in visual arts. Living in a world saturated by words and images from consumer culture, artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Edward Ruscha also challenged the concept of fine art and the conformist values they saw in popular culture. They appropriated and reworked slogans, headlines, and advertisements into clever, whimsical, and arresting artwork that critiqued postwar consumer culture. Although individual styles were wide-ranging, Pop artists to varying degrees believed in the power of words—their use and abuse in product [End Page 60] labeling and logos, for example—to create a more legitimate artistic...

Children as Readers In Children’s Literature: The Power of Texts And The Importance of Reading ed. by Evelyn Arizpe and Vivienne Smith

Children as Readers In Children’s Literature: The Power of Texts And The Importance of Reading ed. by Evelyn Arizpe and Vivienne Smith

Texts as Metaphoric Machines and the Challenge of the Digital

AbstractIn this essay Anna Kouppanou expands the notion of metaphor from its received meaning to refer to an embodied and material process of connectedness that transforms the domains that it brings together. Because of metaphor's reliance on materiality and exteriority Kouppanou turns to literary texts, which she calls “metaphoric machines.” In doing so she sheds light on the specific way texts, as reading/writing technologies, work through metaphorical processes of association. Through the study of print and electronic literary texts Kouppanou shows that every medium brings contents and domains, such as space and time, together and indeed in specific ways, allowing different forms of association, selective organization, and filtering of information. She also underlines that the mappings between these domains often take place unexpectedly and not always between their respective parts. Finally, she discusses the need for literacies that make the reader/writer/user aware of the metaphorical‐associative power of texts.

Negotiating organizational future: symbolic struggles in a fiscal crisis

Purpose– The authors use concepts from the “communication constitutes organizations” (CCO) literature in combination with Cooren’s (2010, 2012) ventriloquism to demonstrate the symbolic uses of texts and shifting interpretations of authority during a negotiation regarding the future of a nonprofit educational institution. The two sides negotiating over how to resolve a fiscal crisis struggled to achieve legitimacy through competing institutional logics, and this paper captures this process through a detailed account. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approach– This study emerged from a multi-year full immersion ethnography undertaken by the second author, who spent over 5,000 hours as a participant observer at the organization. The quotes and observations come form field notes taken during this time.Findings– Communication constitutes the nonprofit institution through two communication flows – self-structuring processes and institutional positioning – and these flows symbolically and materially unified the opposing negotiation parties during the negotiation process as each side struggled to gain legitimacy through competing institutional logics. The process of ventriloquism was the mechanism through which different actors and texts negotiated their levels of authority.Practical implications– This case demonstrates how oppositional groups used and viewed texts throughout a negotiation process, revealing the agency, authority, legitimacy, and symbolic power of texts. This case also highlights the political struggle between institutional logics backed by financial models and professional logics backed by traditional organizational values.Originality/value– At a material level, this case is a detailed examination of organizational members navigating the negotiation process during a fiscal crisis, but on a symbolic level this case demonstrates the communicative means through which oppositional groups negotiate core organizational values, and whether past values can lead organizations to a sustainable future. The observational depth of this case study was only possible through long term, full immersion ethnography, and this depth provides clarity to abstract concepts from CCO, ventriloquism, and institutional theory.

Fashioning the Curator: The Chinese at the Lambing Flat Folk Museum

Fashioning the Curator: The Chinese at the Lambing Flat Folk Museum