Discourse & Society

Investigating how contested periods are remembered by younger generations allows us to better understand the contents that are passed on as well as the discursive processes through which intergenerational transmission occurs. This article explores the intersections of collective and personal memory. We investigate what Uruguayan teenagers know about the dictatorship (1973–1985) and what discourses come into play in shaping these views. The analysis of a group interview, part of an ethnographic project, identifies arguments, representations and evaluations of the period, while exploring intertextual links. The findings show that there are four main arguments used by the youth to explain the dictatorship: reaction to guerrillas, authoritarianism, regional ideological war, and intolerance. The social actors are evaluated in terms of social sanctions with negative evaluations of the guerrilla. Intertextual connections foreground the reception of hegemonic discourses that explain the period in terms of ‘two demons’. What youth know about the past is a situated and socially distributed web of meanings that help them make sense of the past and construct their socio-political identities.

This article focuses on irony in the representation of the privatization of the Italian airline, Alitalia, in the Italian, British and American press. We rely on a previous study (Fusari, 2010, 2011a) of the metaphors found in three electronic corpora containing all the articles published on this event by Repubblica and Corriere della Sera in Italian, The Guardian, The Times and the Financial Times in British English, and The New York Times and the Washington Post in American English, during the six months (August 2008–January 2009) that led to Alitalia’s acquisition by Compagnia Aerea Italiana (CAI), a private consortium of Italian investors. The analysis also focuses on the Italian translation of a Financial Times article which appeared in Corriere della Sera. Through the use of undertranslation, which involves the elimination of a crucial metonymy, the criticism of the Financial Times’s irony is considerably reduced in Italian.

In this article, I set out new methods of analysis in critical discourse analysis. I develop ways to examine multiple genres over time, based in the discourse-historical approach, and ways to analyse the representation of social actors, based in social actor analysis. These methods provide a detailed way of using critical discourse analysis diachronically for multiple texts, analysing the textual, intertextual and contextual. I argue that because there is not a binary relationship between power at an elite level and resistance at a grassroots level, power and resistance rather being present everywhere, critical discourse analysis can and should examine simultaneously multiple societal ‘levels’. My methods help show to what extent more marginal speakers can make themselves heard. I explain how these methods were usefully applied to a study of the role that immigrant organisations have played in discussions about immigration control in the UK since the 1960s.

This article aims to provide a diachronic rhetorical profile of the annual American Memorial Day presidential speech as an example of epideixis, focusing on four sample texts selected from a corpus of 27 speeches and using the discourse historical approach as the primary mode of analysis. The function of epideixis in rhetoric is primarily aesthetic and affective, but this predominance can obfuscate ideological content in texts. Despite some variations between presidents, the article shows that, as a sub-category of the commemorative genre, Memorial Day speeches are relatively homogeneous in structure and style. The analysis locates the discursive role of the speech as a ‘field of action’ within the wider context of American political communication. Despite being thought of as a genre that is free of overtly political content, the Memorial Day corpus offers discrete snapshots of a nation’s self-image over time, but can also be viewed holistically.