Publications

Crafting an effective message for the masses, or the art of populism: An Analysis of new populist rhetoric from a textual perspective  (2016)

Authors:
Lorenzetti, Maria Ivana
Title:
Crafting an effective message for the masses, or the art of populism: An Analysis of new populist rhetoric from a textual perspective
Year:
2016
Type of item:
Contributo in volume (Capitolo o Saggio)
Tipologia ANVUR:
Contributo in volume (Capitolo o Saggio)
Language:
Inglese
Format:
A Stampa
Book Title:
The Languages of Politics/La politique et ses langages
Publisher:
Cambridge Scholars
ISBN:
978-1-4438-9767-9
Page numbers:
125-157
Keyword:
Political Discourse; Rhetoric; Populism; Constrastive Linguistics; Framing and Metaphor
Short description of contents:
Populism is an ambiguous term in political science referring at the same time to demagogy and demophily (Mazzoleni 2004) that ultimately entails putting into question the institutional order by constructing an underdog as a historical agent in opposition to the way things stand in society. This paper investigates the language of populism from a contrastive perspective, based on a corpus of American and Italian election campaign speeches between 2009 and 2016. The approach adopted is interdisciplinary, encompassing the historical, social, textual (De Beaugrande and Dressler 1981) and critical discourse analysis perspectives (Wodak 2007), with a main focus on the rhetorical strategies employed, including metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) and framing (Lakoff 2004). Our findings show that, while each populist politician tends to evoke a specific idealised past in the form of identity narrative, drawing on different domains to shape their oratory, i.e. advertising slogans, cinema and satire, they all emphasise a profound “us and them” dualism in society between the people and the political establishment. However, the fact that the rhetorical devices employed do not differ consistently from those of non-populist politicians, Crafting an effective message for the masses, or the art of populism 126 but only imply different framing strategies, leads us to conclude that some topics more easily lend themselves to be viewed as part of a populist oratory, and that populism is ultimately an ontological category (Laclau 2005a), rather than a precise form of ideology.
Product ID:
93479
Handle IRIS:
11562/950209
Last Modified:
October 19, 2022
Bibliographic citation:
Lorenzetti, Maria Ivana, Crafting an effective message for the masses, or the art of populism: An Analysis of new populist rhetoric from a textual perspective The Languages of Politics/La politique et ses langagesCambridge Scholars2016pp. 125-157

Consulta la scheda completa presente nel repository istituzionale della Ricerca di Ateneo IRIS

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Title Department Managers
The Analysis of Political Discourse Department Lingue e Letterature Straniere Maria Ivana Lorenzetti
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