PALA Summer School

PALA 2015 SUMMER SCHOOL: 13th-15th July, University of Kent (UK) 

This year’s PALA Summer School, aimed at undergraduates and postgraduates, will run from the morning of 13th July to midday of the 15th (just before the main conference starts). It will be led by Professor Lesley Jeffries and Dr Brian Walker of the University of Huddersfield.

The schedule can be found below:

 

Critical stylistics: an analytical toolkit for the critical analysis of texts

09:00 – 09:50 Registration
09:50 – 10:00 Welcome!
Day 1 Introduction
10:00 – 10:50 Power, Ideology and ideation In this session we consider what is meant by power and ideology. We go on to examine how texts organise the world we experience, and how this is demonstrable in the words and structures of the texts themselves.
11:00 – 11:50 Critical Stylistics and CDA Here we look at the history of CDA and some of the dominant approaches. We go on to show how Critical Stylistics, while in some ways different to CDA, fits into and complements this field of research.
12:00 – 12:30 Introducing the analytical tools Here we give a brief overview of the tools we will be introducing over the rest of the school.
12:30 – 14:00 Lunch
The analytical tools #1
14:00 – 15:00 Naming and describing This session explores the various ways in which English texts ‘name’ or represent a view of the world. There are usually many ways of referencing the same things, and here we examine how the choices made by authors can create ideological meaning.
15:00 – 15:30 A coffee break; a comfort break; a leg stretch; an escape
15:30 – 17:00 Representing actions and processes In this session we will deal with the strand of meaning that relates most clearly to the verbal element of the clause and presents information on what is being done, what is happening, and what is.
Day 2 The analytical tools #2
09:00-10:30 Equating and Contrasting One thing that texts can do when they create a version of the world is to tell us what is seen as equivalent and what is seen as contrasting. In this session we consider how texts structure the world in terms of equivalence and opposition and the potential ideological effects such textually constructed meanings can have.
10:30-11:00 This is a coffee break, not a rugby scrum.
11:00-12:30 Enumerating and exemplifying This session considers the ideological effects of two related textual functions of exemplifying, where not all cases of a category are listed, and enumerating, where they are. We will discover that in English there is sometimes no linguistic difference between these functions which can create ambiguity, and this can have ideological consequences.
12:30-14:00 Lunch, which will include various options too numerous to list here.
14:00-15:30 Negation So far we have assumed that texts represent the world as it is or how the text producer thinks it is. Many texts, however, construct non-existent versions of the world. Such non-versions can be created for a great many different ideological reasons.
15:30-16:00 This is a coffee break, but that doesn’t mean that there won’t be any tea.
16:00-17:30 Representing speech and thought Texts present the speech and thoughts of other people and this can be very manipulative of their ideologies as well as those of the reader. Here we will consider the viewpoint of the participants who are discussed in texts but whose words and thoughts are mediated by a narrating voice of the text.
Day 3 Researching ideology in texts
09:00-12:30 Practical analysis using the tools introduced in days 1 and 2. This session will include a coffee break, but there will be no lunch.

 

A downloadable .pdf version of the programme is available here: Critical stylistics Summer School 2015 (1).

The fee for the summer school will be 90 GBP. En-suite accommodation (including breakfast) is available on the University of Kent campus for around 40 GBP per night.

 To register for the Summer School, visit the main conference registration page.

For more information, please email the organising committee on PALA2015@kent.ac.uk.