International Conference: Stylistic Approaches to Pop Culture

Organizers: Christoph Schubert (Vechta) and Valentin Werner (Bamberg)

University of Vechta, Germany
2-3 September 2021

Format: Online Conference

Pop culture appears in diverse textual manifestations, including television series and films, song lyrics, video games, or graphic novels and comics. Although there is no universally accepted definition of pop culture, prototypical texts belong to globalized mainstream media, fulfill the commercial function of mass entertainment, and are dominated by American English. However, despite their international reception and sociocultural impact, and despite the fact that pop culture seems to have overcome its traditional “low culture” status, relevant texts are still clearly underresearched in linguistics. Style is here considered as a motivated choice of specific linguistic items that fulfill communicative functions in accordance with contextual parameters such as author, genre, or discursive context. Correspondingly, this conference intends to investigate stylistic features that contribute to the mass appeal of pop cultural texts, arguably representing the most central type of performed language today. It will also take into account that contemporary pop culture manifestations are genuinely multimodal (combining text and music, text and image, etc.), so that further layers of meaning interact with the verbal discourse.

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Christiana Gregoriou (University of Leeds)
Dan McIntyre (University of Huddersfield)