{"title":"The “Waves:” Conceptualizing Covid-19 as an event through one (particularly) contested metaphor","authors":"Nick Rekenthaler","doi":"10.1016/j.poetic.2023.101808","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This paper bridges scholarship on events with that on metaphors, positing metaphors as a proxy for competing “forms of eventfulness.” Focusing specifically on the “wave” metaphor, I draw from 471 Governor's Covid-19 Briefing transcripts across ten governors—five Democratic, five Republican—from the year 2020 to identify two competing forms of eventfulness with respect to the Covid-19 pandemic. As I show, using both discourse analytic techniques and simple text counts, Democratic governors take up the “wave” metaphor to present what I call “cascading” eventfulness, defined by multiple conditional moments of rupture, or “waves.” In contrast, Republican governors largely avoid the “wave” metaphor to present what I call “calamitous” eventfulness, defined by a singular, decisive moment of rupture. I conclude with a discussion of how my findings contribute to scholarship on eventfulness and political ideology.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47900,"journal":{"name":"Poetics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0000,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Poetics","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304422X23000487","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This paper bridges scholarship on events with that on metaphors, positing metaphors as a proxy for competing “forms of eventfulness.” Focusing specifically on the “wave” metaphor, I draw from 471 Governor's Covid-19 Briefing transcripts across ten governors—five Democratic, five Republican—from the year 2020 to identify two competing forms of eventfulness with respect to the Covid-19 pandemic. As I show, using both discourse analytic techniques and simple text counts, Democratic governors take up the “wave” metaphor to present what I call “cascading” eventfulness, defined by multiple conditional moments of rupture, or “waves.” In contrast, Republican governors largely avoid the “wave” metaphor to present what I call “calamitous” eventfulness, defined by a singular, decisive moment of rupture. I conclude with a discussion of how my findings contribute to scholarship on eventfulness and political ideology.
期刊介绍:
Poetics is an interdisciplinary journal of theoretical and empirical research on culture, the media and the arts. Particularly welcome are papers that make an original contribution to the major disciplines - sociology, psychology, media and communication studies, and economics - within which promising lines of research on culture, media and the arts have been developed.