Textual Strategies Research Articles

A Multi-Modal Study of Persuasive Strategies in Native and Non-Native School Advertisements

The current study investigates how private schools target native and non-native English speakers through YouTube advertisements using a multi-modal discourse analysis approach. The study examines persuasive strategies, how ads appeal to viewers, and influence decision making in native and non-native private school ads. Native school ads may emphasize communicating in English, prestige of private school, and high academic standards. Non-native ads may emphasize diversity of students and resources for learners.Native school ads may use formal, dramatic language while non-native ads use inclusive, accessible language. Ads reflect assumptions about language, education, values and status - native schools emphasize fluency, non-native emphasize inclusive learning. Ads use humor and emotion differently - native ads use culture-specific humor while non-native appeals to shared values like diversity. The study analyzed ads using models from Kress and van Leeuwen(2006), and Halliday(1979) then draw conclusions that verify the hypothesis. Both ad types aim to present a nurturing school but native ads use clearer language while non-native use aspirational, indirect language. Native ads value honesty, respect, collaboration while non-native value inclusiveness, diversity, cultural diversity. The study concludes that ads have similar visual, textual strategies but values and language use varies based on native or non-native audience.

Hindu Nationalism and the Converging, Diverging and Intersecting Identities of Caste and Race in India: Dialogue, Dilemma and Discourse

This essay unpacks how Hindu nationalism has understood the concepts of caste and race through its ideologues’ textual strategies. It is divided into three sections. The initial section uncovers how Hindu nationalism’s dialogue with the colonial framework of knowledge produced several conceptual dilemmas inconsistent with its core objectives. The second part demonstrates how to counter such dilemmas proponents Hindu nationalists indulged in myriad intellectual manoeuvres to arrive at such notions of the interrelationship between caste and race, which are complimentary to its principal agenda. The final section unravels how their intellectual strategies produced a largely conservative outlook of passive reformism.

“The Stranger at Home”: Dissent, Prejudice, and Mary: A Fiction

ABSTRACT This essay explores Wollstonecraft’s experimental first novel, Mary: A Fiction (1788) in the context of Dissenting preoccupation with prejudice. It shows how Wollstonecraft shared the Dissenters’ analysis that prejudice was the source of political and social oppression, and how she extended that insight into her account of the situation of women. She shared with Dissent a belief in education and in print culture as tools to combat prejudice, but her experimental textual strategies differ significantly from, for instance, that of Dissenter Anna Laetitia Barbauld, in her “Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts” (1790). Where Barbauld replicates in print the rhetorical strategies of public and political discourse, Wollstonecraft, in key moments in Mary, draws on the model, from Edward Young, of authentic, persuasive enthusiasm, to “steal into the soul” of her readers. Early in her writing career, she can thus be seen seeking to turn affective transport to political effect, and experimenting with the resources and registers of print culture to combat prejudice, and enact dissent.

Sweeping Emblematics

The article valorizes Renaissance emblematics as an inherently tensional form, steeped in interchange and transition. Movement was not only a thematized topic in emblematic compositions, it was their basic textual strategy to activate meanings and foster interpretation, explore the possibilities and scopes of new forms of communication, and pave the way for a participatory readership. Emblematics was in fact conceived as a brand-new and transdisciplinary textual mode, a mongrel form whose complex interplay of signs favored multiplied discursive models thanks to the constant relay between visual and verbal elements, forcibly made to cohabit the same representational space. Unsurprisingly, these innovative features were soon co-opted and channeled into manipulative practices functional to interpellating and “re-creating” readers, thereby contributing to transform this luxuriant form into a static site of coherence and symbolical expression. The article, on the contrary, reassesses the importance of emblematics as a multifaceted construct which requires a similarly multifaceted theoretical perspective approaching it as a wide-ranging cultural construct, a textual space which ushered in an idea of communication as projective and dislocating, which deployed idiosyncratic meaning procedures and set new hermeneutic parameters, which triggered an incessant mobility in the reading experience, which was teeming with cognitive potentials and ideological bearings.

Voicing Discursive Binaries: A Postcolonial Study of Gordimer’s Short Stories

Massive decolonization occurred in the 21st century. The natives and the diaspora attempted to portray the other side of the image structured by the colonial hegemonic discourse. Gordimer has written against apartheid and raised her voice to articulate the realistic picture of the marginalization faced by the suppressed South Africans in the form of racial and social inequality. She incorporates discourse to challenge the existing colonial discourse and the explicit binaries. This study attempts to investigate the challenges she has put against the existing discursive binaries in her short stories. The concepts of colonial discourse and counter-discourse given by Edward Said and Helen Tiffin serve as a framework to analyze the data collected from the selected text. The findings reveal that Gordimer has employed different techniques of narration and characterization to redress the negative image of the oppressed others in the colonial discourse through binaries. She employs various textual strategies to expose the stereotypical binaries through counter-discursive practices to dismantle the colonial assumptions from the perspective of the natives.

Self-Censorship or Irony? The Rhetoric of Silence in Rosalía de Castro’s “Las literatas”

This article studies the textual strategies used by Rosalía de Castro in “Las literatas” to denounce the structural and epistemic violence suffered by women writers and to defend their right to participate in the public sphere through literary activity. The text appears in a peculiar context, a year after street demonstrations by seminarians prevented the publication of another article of hers in the same Almanaque para la Juventud Elegante. This article, addressing the general theme of the silencing imposed on women, exposes their reaction to any kind of pressure: to continue writing and publishing. The splitting of the narratorial voice to show an excinded, dialogic and even incoherent or contradictory authorial self continues a tradition initiated by Romantic women authors to generate fissures in a model of femininity disciplined within the limits of the space assigned to them.

Autosalutografia. O emancypacyjnych strategiach negocjacji dobrostanu u Małgorzaty Baranowskiej

This article presents a model of reinterpretation of illness narratives from the cate-gory of autopathography to that of autosalutography, i.e. restorative/therapeutic auto-biography. The cases in point are Małgorzata Baranowska’s To jest wasze życie. Być sobą w chorobie przewlekłej [ This Is Your Life: How to Cope with a Chronic Illness] (1994) with their textual strategies of (re)negotiation of autonomy and agency. Drawing on the work of Elselijn Kingma, this analysis takes the constructivist approach to the opposition of health and illness. At the same time, the legacy notion of health with its punitive and oppressive implications, is substituted by the concept of wellbeing (as construed in Tanja Reiffenrath’s Memoirs of Wellbeing). The latter covers a broad range of lived experiences and upgrades the patient’s personal perspective, especially if it is applied within the socio-constructivist understanding of health and illness (disorder).

The Radical Politics of Laughter: Militant Femininity, Comic Misdirection, and Reader Seduction in Edwardian Suffrage Narratives

ABSTRACT The ploy of dissimulation that the suffragette movement harnessed in political practice also played an important role in suffrage literature and stage drama. Here, the trope of comic misdirection (such as the misrecognition of suffrage identities) served to expose the foolishness of anti-feminists, encouraging readers and spectators to dismiss the upholders of the law while applauding suffrage activists. In the process, femininity was reconceptualised in two ways: the essentialist model so misrepresentative of women's life-experience was debunked through comic caricature and contrasted with the “authentic” femininity that manifested in the bravery and daring of militancy. To engage in subversive political acts did not strip a woman of her femininity; it amplified it. Drawing on a range of fiction and stage drama, this essay explores the textual strategy of laughter with which feminist activist writers of the early twentieth century sought to galvanise audience and reader sympathies. Informed by Freudian laughter theory, the article argues that in the triangulation of narrative actors, the agent of comic subversion (the suffragette) was intended to dispose the reader/observer to share her joke at the expense of the representatives of the old order.

Referential processes in the construction of the controversial modality: a study of tweets published by osmar terra mep

This article aims to analyze, from the interface between Textual Linguistics and Argumentation, the use of referential processes in anti-vaccine speeches published on Twitter on the page of Deputy Osmar Terra. In this way, we discuss, based on the polemical modality, how the argumentative directions around the subject of discourse "vaccine" were constructed. Our corpus of analysis consists of tweets published in April 2022. The work constitutes an exploratory study, with qualitative research characteristics and deductive method, allowing us to observe that the argumentative marks manifest themselves through referential processes, such as the nominal forms, referential introductions and anaphores. We rely on the theoretical conceptions of Amossy (2017) to understand the notion of argumentation in the speeches, as well as the peculiarities of the controversial modality. Extending the View Between the argument and LT, we follow the theoretical assumptions of Cavalcante et al. (2020; 2022). In order to understand the concept of text as process, we rely on the assumptions of Koch (2015) and the studies of Monada and Dubois (2015), Cavalcante, Custódio Filho and Brito (2014), which highlight the importance of understanding referencing as a discursive activity. The study indicates that referential processes contribute to the argumentative dynamics of the text and the objects of speech is introduced, resumed, and (re)categorized depending on the communicative purposes of the enunciator. Furthermore, by means of textual strategies, traces of the polemical modality are revealed.

The concept of “freedom” in the Ukrainian diaspora prose

The purpose of this article is to analyze the mechanisms of realization of the concept of “freedom” in the Ukrainian diaspora prose. The object of the study is the literary texts by I. Bahrianyi, V. Bender, I. Kachurovskyi, Yu. Kosach, I. Kostetskyi, S. Liubomyrskyi, M. Prykhodko, I. Smoliy, and S. Fedorivskyi. Contextual analysis, descriptive, historical and literary, and biographical methods were used to achieve the goal. The article’s relevance is due to the need to comprehend the problem of freedom during the Russian-Ukrainian war, which prompts a new reading of the diaspora’s literary texts, which in many ways proved to be prophetic and instructive. The experience of colonial Ukraine during the liberation struggle and the Second World War provides an opportunity to better understand current military events and the tactics of the occupiers. The novelty of the work lies in the fact that the concept of “freedom” is studied in depth in the works of prose by diaspora writers. The analysis includes little-known texts by diaspora authors. The results of the study have shown that the analyzed concept is realized in the texts of the Ukrainian diaspora on the issues of existential and national freedom, which aroused the interest of both Ukrainian and foreign readers. The concept of “freedom” is presented both in fiction and in critical and journalistic discourse. In prose texts, this concept is realized at different levels of the text: at the level of problematics, figurative system, and textual strategies. The author emphasizes that for diaspora writers, personal freedom was inseparable from national freedom, so a recurring theme is the national liberation struggle, the discourse of which shapes the understanding of freedom as a necessary value. The results of the research can be used in the study of Ukrainian diaspora literature. The next stage in the realization of this topic will be the study of the concept of personal “freedom” in the works of the younger generation of the diaspora, in particular, members of the New York group.

EMOCIONALNI KOVITLAC U ROMANU „PLAVA“ MAGDALENE MIKOVIĆ

Using the example of the novel Blue (Plava) by Magdalena Miković, the paper investigates the way in which emotions as mental states affect our physical health, cognitive development, decision-making, but also the understanding of literary texts. Given the fact that the best approach to explaining the representation of emotions in literary texts is to focus on the literary techniques that manifest emotional states, this paper tries to explain the textual strategies with the help of which the emotional roller coaster is represented, which resulted in a deeper understanding of readers.

Polyphony. Textual strategies (From Polyphony of Literary Texts to Polyphonic Conceptual Translation)

The category of polyphony, related to musical polyphony, was adapted to the fi eld of literary studiesby Mikhail Bakhtin who, analyzing the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, referred it to the genreof the novel. In this article, the author perceives polyphony broadly, and focus on the recognitionand description of related textual strategies and their functions not only in literature at differentlevels of its artistic organization but also in conceptual translation that takes into account parodyof style. The article shows the strategy of polyphonic transposition in the text „How would BolesławLeśmian write a poem Mary Had a Liitle Lamb in English” written by Marian Polak Chlabicz.

MILITARY FICTION FOR CHILDREN OF THE RUSSO-UKRAINIAN WAR AS A LITERARY FIELD

Background. The phenomenon of military fiction for children had been on the margin of independent Ukraine’s scientific and social discourses before the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Since 2014, writers and publishers have enhanced their activity in this area responding to the needs of the society, particularly to the necessity to explain to children in their language the processes they witness, to the desire to distract them from traumatic experiences or to use books as part of therapeutic intervention.
 Purpose. To arrange the processes occurring in the Ukrainian literary space and connected with military fiction for children in 2014-2023.
 Methods. The sociology of literature approaches have been utilized.
 Results. To the major formants of the literary field of children’s military fiction belong social discourse and information produced by its actants: writers, publishers, literary experts and critics, literary bloggers, online literary platform teams etc., as well as all those interested (parents, children, character prototypes, scholars who help interpret literary works and ensure their appropriate psychological and emotional reception) who are related to literary product interpretation and consumption. Publishing houses’ effort towards filling free genre niches switches to active discussion of children’s books’ therapeutic and awareness-raising role under warfare (how to write it to avoid harming the traumatized child, how to better arrange the reception process, what tips to give to parents). Writers who tell the children about war update textual and receptive strategies. Literary platforms (Barabooka, Chytomo etc.) run discussions and events. Public attention is sustained via interviews with publishers and writers, literature overviews, updating on social media the information about the authors who fight, volunteer, take part in events, meet with children. Children themselves try their hand at creating book-trailers, writing reviews etc. The publishers expand young readers’ access to their products: books (ranging from regular paper books for “young adults” to graphic novels, comics, picture books, words-free books), audiobooks as well as animated movies created on their basis.
 Conclusions and perspectives. Children’s war fiction has highlighted the angle of interdependence of literature and society, which is revealed in the cases of crisis and is connected with the social activity of the parties to the literary process. The use of sociology of literature techniques made it possible to analyze the impact of the literary field actants (writers, publishers, readers and all those interested) on the development of textual strategies, the interaction between literature and society, as well as to trace the match of literary texts to the social discourse and further on, to reflect on the impact of social development.

Інтерпретативні стратегії сучасної української й польської прози в контексті літературознавчої антропології

Interpretative strategies are explored as a type of textual strategies alongside narrative and receptive ones. We illustrate modern, prose‑bound interpretative strategies targeting various types of perception and aesthetic delight. The interpretative strategies of modern Ukrainian and Polish prose are affected by the author’s choice of the convention lines implemented in the story, and the types of perception the story is targeting. These parameters help implement the story’s semantic structure, which determines the way it is interpreted by the reader. The reader’s own life, emotional, and receptive experience builds a criterion for the story’s maturity. The reader’s interpretative effort is seen in the text as a game which is divided into separate milestones and requires a shift in the interpretative vector at each of them or implies the reader’s ability to perceive the virtual worlds of the rhizomatic plot that maps a modern person’s mental processes. The ability to notice in one text various interpretative strategies constitutes one of the ways for the reader to take aesthetic delight as well as building within them man‑world interaction skills, the ability to accept the world’s uncertainty, someone else’s different attitude.

Introduction: Reconsidering Paratext as a Received Concept.

It is now 40 years since Gérard Genette's work introduced the term paratexts into literary studies, giving a unifying name to the many kinds of texts that serve as thresholds to other texts. The term and concept have migrated into the study of several other media forms, including video game studies, thanks principally to Mia Consalvo in Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Video Games (2007) and Steven Jones in The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strategies (2008). The term's meaning expanded in the process, which has been the subject of much debate since then. Over a decade later, the timing seems apt to take stock of the concept of paratextuality and consider new ways of adapting it. This introduction to a special issue titled "Video Games and Paratextuality" reconsiders Genette's reception in video game studies, and introduces a set of articles that together look beyond Genette.

İbrani Mitinin Yıkımı: Anita Diamant’ın Kırmızı Çadır’ında Dişil Yazı

Anita Diamant’s first novel The Red Tent (1997) retells the story of Dinah, Jacob’s and Leah’s daughter, Joseph’s sister in the Genesis chapter of the Old Testament. In this revised story, Diamant creates Dinah, the silenced woman of the Old Testament, as the narrator of the novel. Weaving a different narrative than the Hebrew myth, the narrator tries to subvert hierarchical structures of phallogocentrism by focusing on women’s bodies, femininity, and sexual power. This study, basing its argument on post-structuralist feminist theory, examines how patriarchal ideology and discourse are challenged through female language and ‘feminine writing’. The analysis of the rewritten text reveals that feminine writing frees the female body and female sexuality from the authority of androcentric ideology. Additionally, the textual strategies, used by Diamant to deconstruct the patriarchal order and to create a gynocentric myth, present alternative definitions of female identity.

VPRAŠALNI NAGOVORI IN DRUGE BESEDILOTVORNE STRATEGIJE V INTERVJUJIH NA RADIU IN V PODKASTU: SREDSTVO ŽANRA ALI ZNAK KONVERZACIONALIZACIJE?

The article analyses the frequency of interview addresses, as typologically defined by Korošec (1998), in four radio interviews and four interview podcasts featuring the same guests. In addition, some other textual strategies, such as supporting signals and role reversals, are analysed. The journalistic interview is a highly institutionalised form of one-way dialogue, which has indeed been proven in radio interviews to a considerable extent. In podcasts, however, due to the different production and listening practices, speech usually displays more characteristics of everyday discourse, as was displayed in the choices of interview addresses and other textual strategies in the analysed podcasts. Keywords: interview, interview address, radio, podcast, everyday speech

“To dream of a wildness distant from ourselves”: Capitalism, colonialism, and the Robinsonade

ABSTRACT Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe holds an iconic position, not solely as a work of literature, but also for its influence in economic and social theory. This article reflects on this influence by mobilizing Charles Mills’s concept of epistemologies of ignorance and Lorenzo Veracini’s work on psychological defence mechanisms in settler colonial societies. This theoretical framework motivates a close textual analysis of Robinson Crusoe that focuses particularly on four textual strategies: paired contrasts between Xury and Friday that frame enslavement as a sacrificial act; strategic use of “cosmopolitan” ideals; a theory of subjection as the foundation for legitimate power; and moral relativisms that rationalize Crusoe’s theft of Indigenous land. This analysis then provides the foundation for an original interpretation of Marx’s Capital as a critically inverted Robinsonade: one designed to demonstrate how global relations of colonial expropriation generate a crucible in which a particular imaginary of autonomous individuality is forged.

Les mémoires de prison postcommunistes roumains et la poétique de la résilience du moi

Following the dismantling of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989, survivors of this totalitarian regime wrote down their stories about suffering and injustice. Their memoirs and autobiographical works have become representative of post-communist life writing, promoting debates on trauma, memory, and resistance strategies. However, life writing scholars have not explored the textual strategies employed by writers to construct their ego-resilient Self, namely, their capacity to adjust to challenging circumstances. To instantiate the case, Romanian memoirs and transcribed interviews have been selected for the corpus given the highly repressive nature of the Romanian communist regime. The project pursues the following two research objectives: (a) to examine the textual strategies employed by narrators in their construction of ego-resiliency and (b) to analyse the historical specificities of Romanian communism while expanding knowledge on this totalitarian regime. To this end, the research combines Narrative Inquiry with Personality Psychology.

Education on plagiarism in Chinese-L1 textbooks on academic writing published in China

Teachers in Anglophone universities have often attributed Chinese ESL students’ plagiarism to “cultural difference”, the implication being that what is considered plagiarism in the English-speaking world may not be seen as plagiarism in China. We believe this assumption needs to be questioned on the basis of systematic evidence gathered from the local L1 (first language) context; a large collection of writing textbooks published over time is potentially a valuable dataset for starting to look for such evidence. By analysing the relevant content in a collection of 60 textbooks on Chinese-L1 (Chinese as the First Language) academic writing, our study aimed to answer this question: According to these textbooks, what is plagiarism and how can one avoid plagiarism? Data-driven content analysis revealed that despite alignment with the Anglophone world in defining what is plagiarism, their approach to dealing with it differs. The Chinese textbooks focus on large-scale copying in conceptualising plagiarism, with explanation of plagiarism at local or sentence and paragraph levels, bypassed; and for ways to avoid plagiarism, self-discipline and the formalities of source acknowledgement are emphasised, but textual strategies of proper source citation are hardly addressed. We point out that such gaps in the textbooks, and accordingly, in the Chinese education system, are partly responsible for Chinese students’ confusion in the proper practices of source use in academic writing. We end the paper by proposing avenues for future research for further understanding the issue of plagiarism in the local L1 environment and for interrogating the debatable “cultural difference” view of plagiarism.