Published in Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
The United Kingdom’s (UK) relationship with the European Union (EU) and the ongoing Brexit negotiations have become the primary focus of both media and public attention. The decision to leave the EU marks not only a crucial point in the UK’s history, it also indicates the current political developments in both Britain and Europe. Brexit can be seen...
Published in Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
The term populism is omnipresent in current political science and political discourse. This paper discusses how so-called “populist” discourse is linguistically construed in the 2017 election manifestos of the German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the British United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). It does so by operationalising populism c...
Published in Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
In a recent study (Miglbauer, Marlene and Veronika Koller (2019). “‘The British People have Spoken’: Voter Motivations and Identities in Vox Pops on the British EU Referendum.” Veronika Koller, Susanne Kopf and Marlene Miglbauer, eds. Discourses of Brexit. Abingdon: Routledge, 86–103.), we investigated vox pops (short for ‘vox populi,’ i.e. ‘voice ...
Published in Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
This paper contributes to the discussion on the reference to ‘the people’ in contemporary politics. Illuminating the tension raised by representation, this corpus-assisted analysis investigates how Members of Parliament discursively construct the necessity to represent and involve the people while being at the same time the ones holding the floor. ...
Published in Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
There is widespread agreement that the so-called ‘Brexit’ – the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union – is a fundamentally populist project. However, the language of the public face of this project, Prime Minister Theresa May, has not, so far, been studied with respect to populist speech patterns. This paper presents a series of ...
Published in Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Starting out with a brief overview of recent TV series that feature complex and complicated female characters – or, as we call them, ‘difficult women’ – this introduction investigates the changing manner in which women have been represented on TV in previous decades. Demonstrating that especially TV shows of the 2010s undermine and work against tra...
Published in Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Published in Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Westworld is a preeminent example of Peak TV: it has fully embraced the current context of production and reception and constructs its narrative with that in mind. In the tradition and evolution of television series which Jason Mittell deemed ‘Complex TV’ a decade ago, it is a highly self-reflexive, metatextual genre hybrid which confidently employ...
Published in Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
This article approaches HBO’s Veep through the lens of what Dan Hassler-Forest (2014) has described as the meta-genre of ‘Quality TV.’ Against the backdrop of ‘Quality TV’s’ conspicuous investment in masculinity, I ask how Veep actualizes the meta-genre’s conventions of moral ambiguity and sensationalist storytelling around a female protagonist and...
Published in Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
This article analyzes the first season of Damages (2007) as an early example of the representation of ‘difficult’ women on television. More specifically, I investigate the relationship between the show’s character conception and its complex narration. I argue that all the major male and female characters on the show are ‘difficult’ in the sense tha...
