Stylistic Approaches to Pop Culture

This collection showcases the unique potential of stylistic approaches for better understanding the multifaceted nature of pop culture discourse. As its point of departure, the book takes the notion of pop culture as a phenomenon characterized by the interaction of linguistic signs with other modes such as imagery and music to examine a diverse range of genres through the lens of stylistics. Each section is grouped around thematic lines, looking at literary fiction, telecinematic discourse, music and lyrics, as well as cartoons and video games. The 12 chapters analyze different forms of media through five central strands of stylistics, from sociolinguistic, pragmatic, cognitive, multimodal, to corpus-based approaches. In drawing on these various stylistic frameworks and applying them across genres and modes, the contributions offer readers deeper insights into the role of scripted and performed language in social representation and identity construction, thereby highlighting the affordances of stylistics research in studying pop cultural texts. This volume is of particular interest to students and researchers in stylistics, linguistics, literary studies, media studies, and cultural studies.

Christoph Schubert is Full Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Vechta, Germany. His major research areas are stylistics, discourse studies, pragmatics, and text linguistics. His publications comprise contributions to outlets such as the Journal of Literary Semantics, Journal of Language and Politics, Discourse Studies, Journal of Pragmatics, and Text & Talk. He is author of a monograph on the linguistic constitution of space in descriptive texts (2009), co-editor of the volume Variational Text Linguistics (2016), co-author of the textbook Introduction toDiscourse Studies (2018), and co-editor of a special issue of Discourse, Context & Media on cohesion in multimodal discourse (2021).

Valentin Werner is Associate Professor of English and Historical Linguistics at the University of Bamberg, Germany. His research areas comprise applied linguistics, variational linguistics, and media linguistics, as well as stylistics. In addition to papers published in journals such as Corpora, English Language & Linguistics, Linguistics, and Text & Talk, he has (co-)edited the volumes Pop Culture in Language Education: Theory, Research, Practice (Routledge, 2021), The Language of Pop Culture (Routledge, 2018), and Re-Assessing the Present Perfect (2016), as well as a special issue of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics on telecinematic language (2021).