Stylistic Approaches to Pop Culture

Abstract

As a field of academic study, pop culture has historically been under researched in the social sciences by virtue of a perception that it constitutes low culture, and is thus less worthy of critical study than traditionally canonical cultural products. While films, television shows, and pop music are consumed by mass audiences at an ever more considerable rate, their status as the object of linguistic analysis has long been neglected in favor of more perceivably high culture texts such as poems, novels, and plays. In recent years, however, there has been a shift in thinking in this area, and the ideological significance of language use in such pop(ular) artforms has come to be recognized as both a reflection of, and a vehicle for the communication of, contemporary ideology.Since the turn of the millennium, there have been significant works on the language of pop culture (Bell and Gibson; Queen; Werner), the language of film and television, often dubbed “telecinematic linguistics” (Bateman and Schmidt; Bednarek; Beach; Beers Fägersten; Forchini; Harrison; Hodson; LippiGreen; Marshall and Werndly; Piazza et al.; Richardson), and the language of pop music (Beal; Coupland; Flanagan; Gerfer; Harrison and Ringrow; Jansen and Westphal; Jansen; Machin; McKerrell and Way; Pennycook; Ross and Rivers; Simpson; Watts and Morrissey; Werner; West; WisemanTrowse). The concept of performed language underpins all of these areas of interest, with the linguistic study of pop culture texts necessarily framed with the central notion that the language being analyzed is at least to some extent “inauthentic”: crafted, deliberately or even subconsciously, with a consideration of the effect that linguistic choices will have on the communication of artists’/characters’ identities, and ultimately the effect this will have on how the audience interprets the text.The present volume, Stylistic Approaches to Pop Culture is edited by Christoph Schubert and Valentin Werner, and builds on the latter’s 2018 introductory edited volume The Language of Pop Culture. This is the first book to focus exclusively on stylistic approaches to a range of pop culture text genres; it thus exhibits a more consistent thematic approach to pop cultural linguistic study than its predecessor, which by necessity provides a broader outlook on this field of linguistic inquiry. Stylistics here is defined relatively broadly, and encompasses a range of approaches, these being social stylistic, pragmatic, cognitive, multimodal, and corpus-based stylistic analysis.The book comprises 10 chapters and is divided into subsections that delve into different spheres of pop culture: pop fiction; telecinematic discourse; pop music and lyrics; and cartoons and video games. This establishes pop culture as a broad church indeed, with a useful introductory chapter from Werner on the nature of pop culture texts from a stylistic perspective bookended by an afterword from Michael Toolan on the present and future of pop cultural linguistics.In the introductory chapter, Werner and Schubert acknowledge this relatively recent increase in the number of works focusing on pop cultural linguistics (see also Werner 2022 on this term) as “a turning point” for this area of study. They define pop culture texts according to a number of criteria, including their mass production and consumption and at least semifictionality. Above all, they note that such texts “affect most, if not all, people on a daily basis” and thus champion the importance and fruitfulness of their analysis. Stylistics is established as a particularly vital discipline for studying such texts, based on its tendency to focus on fictional texts, and its use of an extensive toolkit for studying language through a range of frameworks and distinctive approaches.Gregoriou’s chapter on misdirection in Robinson’s 1988 crime novel A Dedicated Man kicks off the section on pop fiction. By focusing on special collection archive material at Leeds University, Gregoriou explores the popular nature of the crime fiction genre, and how authors bury (background) “criminal related clues” which encourage a reader with experience of the genre to engage with the crime solving process. A cognitive stylistic approach is adopted, through which Gregoriou unravels the grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic features which contribute to a range of strategies through which the author guides the reader throughout this process. By considering the reader’s schematic expectations (alongside effects of regular disruption and refreshment), the notion of a cognitive “suspect list” is explored, which the author carefully feeds throughout the story, and which is influenced by how the author communicates such characteristics as gender, sexuality, and physical capability.This is followed by Montoro’s corpus-stylistic study of the adaptation of Charlaine Harris’s pop fiction novel Dead Until Dark into the hugely popular vampire-oriented HBO series True Blood. By focusing on the Southern Gothic genre, linguistic analysis of both the novel and the first series of the TV adaptation is used to provide insight into how concepts of race and sexuality are often central to stories about vampires. A rigorous corpus-based methodology allows Montoro to uncover, via a semantic and part-of-speech analysis, that themes of color (dark/light) and sexuality are especially prominent in both the novel and TV series, but that the adaptation foregrounds these issues more explicitly and extensively. The author thus concludes that pop culture texts are a particularly favorable ground for analysis, given the evident focus on complex social concerns.Karpenko-Seccombe’s analysis of language use in season 4 of the British reality show Love Island is the first of four papers in the area of telecinematic stylistics: the language of film and television. Reality shows such as Love Island are noted as being particularly interesting given their complex hybrid nature in terms of the extent to which language and communication can be considered natural and unscripted. The author employs a corpus-based approach, focusing on keywords, n-grams, and concordances; analysis reveals that the communicative context, characterized by communication for the benefit of both addressees and a watching audience (as well as “scripted elements of the format”), is central to the linguistic style observed. Language is found to be repetitive, formulaic, and atypical in comparison with natural spoken language, and emblematic of this popular hybrid genre of telecinematic discourse.This chapter is followed by Reichelt’s multimodal analysis of ideological stance-taking in the first four seasons of American comedy-drama series Jane the Virgin. By analyzing patterns of bilingual Spanish-English codeswitching, as well as the treatment of non-native/Czech English, the author “exemplifies the multi-layered styles that are constructed in pop culture artifacts,” and champions the need for detailed analysis “to deconstruct potentially meaningful ideologies.” Reichelt’s use of an ideological indexing framework based on the work of Lippi-Green and Androutsopoulos reveals a complex set of ideologies, ranging from standard-language superiority over minority language users to the use of codeswitching as a positive stance marker. Visual elements analyzed are based on three scenes, which are seen to reinforce the findings of the linguistic data. The author concludes that there are signs of more positive representation of different linguistic codes than previous studies have found, but that some issues of stereotyping and discrimination remain.Co-editor Schubert next considers the original screenplay of Tarantino’s 2015 film The Hateful Eight, focusing on expanded question-answer adjacency pairs alongside Gricean pragmatic elements which generate suspense through the presence of uncooperative discourse. Schubert focuses on “selected pivotal scenes” and thus takes a qualitative approach to the analysis of conversational features. As a “whodunit” narrative not dissimilar to that discussed in Gregoriou’s earlier chapter, communicative noncooperation is seen as an essential pragmatic device in generating the suspense which is central to the film’s genre. Schubert considers suspense as a core element of a range of pop culture artifacts, and thus champions pragma-stylistic analysis as a vital component to understanding the “boosted entertainment effects” which characterize pop culture texts more broadly.The final contribution to the section on telecinematic stylistics is provided by Hoffmann, who also adopts a conversation analytic approach, this time to evaluate the openings of 127 phone calls across 47 contemporary American films. Hoffman uncovers notable differences between the performed language of movie phone calls (some of which, due to the medium, have only one audible participant) and the structures found in naturally occurring comparable data. Such variation is seen to be strategic: a narrative device to reduce phatic communication, enabling quicker plot development at the possible expense of authentically representing more “real” communication. Interestingly, analysis suggests minimal variation across film genres, indicating that the “compressed” style in phone call sequences is a broadly characteristic feature of telecinematic language.The section on pop music and lyrics comprises two rather different approaches to the genre, the first being Jansen and Gerfer’s analysis of Alex Turner’s live performance at a recent Albert Hall gig from Sheffield indie band Arctic Monkeys. Building on previous work on Turner (Beal; Flanagan), the authors adopt a social stylistic approach, focussing on the phonetic features of the singer’s performed language. The analysis reinforces previous findings of Turner’s shifting from his early vernacular style to a more Americanized delivery, and sheds a much-welcome light on live vocal performance, a medium the authors note as being under-researched. Jansen and Gerfer conclude that Turner’s “lounge singer delivery” is now applied even to his earlier songs when performing them live, although they note that some relics of his earlier vernacular style still remain. The point made in the conclusion that “singing-inherent reasons” could provide an explanation for the shift to American style is particularly salient, not just for Turner’s performances, but for those of British singers more generally; its premeditation on the shift in delivery from lyrics which were previously more “spoken” to those which are now more “sung” is a sound and vital observation. This is an area in which it seems that we, as linguists, are still only scratching the surface.Werner’s approach to the study of Eminem’s lyrics is a sharp departure from the performative social stylistics of the preceding chapter, with a diachronic comparative study of the Detroit-born rapper’s lyrics conducted via a corpus-stylistic analysis of all 11 of his albums across a prolific 25-year career. Eminem’s lyrics are compared to rap lyrics more generally in the LYRAP corpus, as well as being analyzed in terms of how they have developed stylistically over time, via the analysis of semantic frequency and keywords. The artist is found to use a more “nouny” style, which is also characterized by the use of proper nouns referring to himself and characters/ persons important to him as an individual, and a lack of “ghettocentric” language and themes commonly found in the rap genre. While longitudinal shifts are identified in the data, these are perhaps not as notable as might be expected, and Werner suggests that a focus on how individual albums differ from one another is a productive focus of analysis. Overall, Eminem’s idiosyncratic style is illuminated effectively by the corpus-stylistic approach employed here and, as the author notes, there is considerable scope for further linguistic analysis of this particularly complex artist.The final section moves onto cartoons and video games, with the former genre considered by Cutler in her chapter on speech acts and New York dialect in the Little Nemo in Slumberland print cartoon series. The chapter focuses on Flip, a character in an early twentieth-century newspaper cartoon, whose New York accent/dialect and general demeanor index him as working class, and often construct him as a figure of ridicule in a pop culture artifact with a largely middle-class readership. Analysis also considers issues of racial profiling and how language use by another character (“Jungle Imp”) propagates discriminatory attitudes which were commonly found in this period. Cutler’s chapter illustrates how successful an approach to evaluating pop culture characterization through a combination of linguistic approaches (here sociolinguistic and pragma-stylistic) can be.A particular gem of this volume is Stamenković’s multimodal treatment of the ever-popular Football Manager video game series. The chapter takes a diachronic approach to evaluating how information is conveyed to the player in terms of the respective volume of linguistic and nonlinguistic (primarily visual) elements. Stamenković champions the importance of video games as a genre of study in pop cultural linguistics and laments the lack of stylistic attention to them historically. Analysis is based on three versions of the game, from 2007 to 2019. As someone who can remember playing the first iteration of this game (1992’s Championship Manager) as a child, it is a shame a broader timespan was not possible. This chapter is more concerned with visual elements than the others in this volume and provides a neat shift in focus in this regard. The overall findings, that a shift from combinations of text-only and image-only elements to more inter-twined multimodal communication, are interesting, and present a positive platform for further studies of this game, and indeed the video game genre more generally. As Stamenković notes, there is considerable opportunity to adopt a whole range of approaches to study linguistic and broader semiotic meaning-making in this area.Finally, Michael Toolan provides a welcome “afterword,” in which he reiterates the opening thoughts of the volume, where Werner noted the suitability of stylistic methods for the study of pop culture texts. The closing chapter acts very much as a call to arms, once again lamenting the prior ostracization of pop genres, and the regular practice of reducing culture to high/low, canonical/commercial dichotomies. Toolan proposes multimodality as perhaps the most productive way forward, while also noting the effectiveness of corpus approaches evidenced in the volume.Overall, this is a well-organized and illuminating collection that reflects (and indeed only briefly scrapes the surface of) the kaleidoscopic range of effective stylistic approaches to pop culture texts. Perhaps the most notable reason that this is one of an extremely small number of publications that focus on linguistic approaches to a broad spectrum of pop culture genres is that to do so is an extremely difficult feat. Despite the challenge of bringing together a diverse range of stylistic analyses, this is a volume that hangs together well, and is underpinned by a common focus on performed language. Methodologically contrasting papers such as the two in the section on pop music and lyrics here illustrate how a common goal of unpacking the linguistic construction of artists’ identities can be achieved by vastly differing methods. Stylistics events and conferences for years have included papers on pop culture texts, and it is particularly enlightening to bring a collection of such often diverse studies together in one publication, in order to survey the vast toolkit at the disposal of the pop culture stylistician.Potential areas for critique could be that the breadth of the subject area is such that hugely fascinating genres like pop music are only touched on fairly briefly, and cartoons and video games only comprise one chapter each. A chapter featuring a multimodal approach to pop music would have been a welcome addition, given that this is one particularly under-researched area that involves considerable methodological complexity (see Machin on this). The broad definition of stylistics adopted here encompasses a wide range of methodologies from quantitative analysis of phonetic features in pop music to conversation analysis in film dialogue, to cognitive stylistic investigation of the crime fiction writing and reading process. While this might be considered a strength of the volume, it also exemplifies the wide and disparate nature of the range of approaches to pop culture study through stylistics. It is perhaps something of a back-handed compliment to note that this volume could easily have been twice the length and that this might in fact have improved it as a collection.In all, Werner and Schubert’s new collection is a welcome addition to the growing volume of work on pop cultural linguistic and provides a useful complement to Werner’s previous introduction to this area of study. Given the relative lack of books that focus on the language of pop culture in a broad sense i.e. encompassing a range of pop culture genres, rather than focusing specifically on pop music or tele-cinematic texts, this has to be considered an important publication. It is indeed hoped that we will reach a day when any study of pop culture language is not necessarily prefaced with the “pop culture texts have long been disregarded by linguists” introduction. With the increasing regularity of stylistic publications on pop culture texts, and a growing number of modules on degree programs now encompassing approaches to pop culture texts, Werner and Schubert’s volume is sure to be a popular addition to many an academic library or personal bookshelf for years to come.