Mediated Stylistics

Mediated stylistics is a new and still emerging approach to the analysis of media texts (e.g. news programs, newspaper articles). Its aims are twofold: first, to take seriously the idea that media texts (e.g. news programs, newspaper articles) involve 'the construction of stories by other means'; and second to take seriously the idea that in an age marked by digital connectivity, media texts are inherently interactive phenomena. To meet these aims, mediated stylistics has brought together the analytic toolkits of discursive psychology—which is finely attuned to the contextual specificities of interaction—and stylistics—which is finely attuned to the grammatical/rhetorical/narratorial specificities of texts as texts. Recent research in which mediated stylistics has been put to work, for instance, has shown that and how mediated representation of issues like sexism, sexualisation, alleged rape and violence against women can differ, and differ in rhetorically consequential ways, from the original un-mediated source material.

As a broadly ethnomethodological approach, mediated stylistics is strongly influenced by discursive psychology (DP), as well as the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), membership categorization analysis (MCA) and the work of stylisticians like Mick Short, Paul Simpson and Lesley Jeffries in which the analytic utility of stylistics to and for an understanding of data other than strictly 'literary' texts becomes immediately apparent. What unites these approaches is their rejection of a particularly widespread understanding of language in which words-in-here-on-a-page name things-out-there-in-the-world. Because this understanding assumes a natural link between descriptions and the events so described it also assumes a non-linguistic sense of the world as the final arbiter of the in/accuracy of descriptions. For DP, SSK and MCA, however, there can be no socially meaningful sense of the non-linguistic without the founding, constitutive force of language. Although language might not be all there is in the world, it is, nevertheless, all there is in the world that allows for the world to become accountable and knowable to ourselves and others. And once you reject—as these approaches reject—the possibility of some non-linguistic arbiter of accuracy, it follows that all descriptions (whether those we decide to treat as accurate or those we do not) have to be understood as the products of particular, locally specific contexts. The issue is no longer whether mediated texts transmit in/accurate in-formation, but how they act as "vehicles for action", where such actions might include defending someone, accusing someone, confessing to something, or any number of other things besides. It is here that we see how an ethnomethodological approach to language opens the possibility for a mediated stylistics; that is, for analytical tools traditionally associated with stylistics to be adopted for use within media studies. A journalist writing a news article about 'real events' and a novelist constructing a believably-real-yet-imaginary-world may well be working with different materials, but they are both engaged in essentially the same kind of literary task: building descriptive vehicles with the potential to pull off a certain set of contextually specific actions such as detailing, characterizing, informing, confessing, defending, accusing, and so on, in what constitutes an infinitely extendable list of other such social actions.

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