A Narrative Approach to Social Media Mourning: Small Stories and Affective Positioning

ISBN-13: 9781138286023 / Angielski / Twarda / 2020 / 224 str.

Korina Giaxoglou

Opis

This book offers a comprehensive theoretical and empirical engagement with the linguistic study of narrative as manifested in "mediatized mourning", the death-related rituals and memorialization activities found online in digital environments. Focusing on a "small story" approach, the volume meditates on the nature of contemporary mourning by grounding the discussion in its historical antecedents and then looking at how sociolinguistic and discourse-related perspectives can shed light on issues of identity construction and social and cultural change that emerge in examples of the "mediatized mourning" of today. The book engages with a rigorous set of data collected from popular social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to explore how small stories related to death and dying are shared, on both the personal and public scales, and how they contribute not only to self-portrayals of mourning but to our collective understanding of trauma and loss. This innovative volume will be key reading for students and scholars in discourse analysis, narrative studies, media and cultural studies, anthropology, and digital communication.

Spis treści

1. Introduction  2. Histories of Mourning  3. A Small Stories Approach to Social Media Mourning  4. Small Stories of Illness and Dying on YouTube  5. Small Stories of Everyday Mourning on Facebook  6. Small Stories of Ecstatic Mourning on Twitter  7. Visual Small Stories of Mourning on Twitter  8. Small Stories of Mourning and Affective Positioning

O autorze

Dr Korina Giaxoglou is Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and English Language at the Open University, UK, where she leads the Health Discourse Research Group. Her research on mourning, narrative, affect and sharing has appeared in edited volumes, special issues, and peer-reviewed journals including Pragmatics, Applied Linguistics Review, Discourse, Context and Media and Social Media +Society.