News Breaks or News Fakes: Introduction to A Transnational History of News
Is FoMO (Fear Of Missing Out) a recent development? When and how did the insatiable appetite for news develop? How did news sources become sites of fakes and manipulation? The course introduces (socio)pragmatic approaches to historical news discourse, focusing on social identities, gender, culture, distribution of power, marginalised groups, aspects of multimodality, etc. The proseminar focuses on discourse structures and language devices used in the processes of shaping public opinion (e.g. presentation of fake news) that characterise both historical and contemporary media. This involves issues of reliability of contents and representations created by periodical press from the 18th century onwards. Specific genres of news to be covered include, among others, classified and commercial advertising, letters to the editor, crime reports. A transnational perspective on news circulation is adopted allowing for comparisons across Polish and English historical news
- Teacher: Matylda Włodarczyk