Sloganisation

As well as having been stamped as the hallmark of queer drama in the literature of North America, Angels in America contributed in great extent to raise awareness for the queer and AIDS activism which was having its heyday at the beginning of the 1990s. Angels in America, published in 1991, conveys the story of the 1980s detached and isolated communities of HIV positive people, Jews, Mormons, and homosexuals as the AIDS epidemic striking at its most destructive period in North America. I will attempt to analyse the ways in which the AIDS crisis and queer awareness are intertwined into the long-lasting discussion of identity politics in Angels in America, and I will both argue the effects of the underrepresentation of different minority communities on different characters, and how the play criticizes the misconceptions about these minorities.

This paper aims to describe the notion of 'sloganisation', with special regard to the fortune and circulation of certain slogans in Italian public discourse. An analysis of their forms, contexts of occurrence (political propaganda, advertising, football supporters) and means of diffusion (street talk, electoral manifestos, traditional and new media) shows an increasing desemantisation of this kind of message. Slogans are routinely used by political parties and are widely quoted, regardless of their ideological content, merely in order to create identification or to increase the polemical attitude of their leader. 1. INTRODUZIONE Il termine slogan, di origine scozzese, viene introdotto in Italia dai traduttori di Walter Scott (1831: nel significato etimologico di 'grido di guerra di un clan') e si diffonde a partire dagli anni '30 del XX secolo significato di 'parola d'ordine' e 'motto' (DELI), prima nell'ambito della pubblicità commerciale, quindi in graduale sostituzione del termine motto (anche nell'accezione politica), per poi erodere anche lo spazio semantico di massima e sentenza (termini fino ad allora usati per indicare una formula concisa a carattere sapienziale, che condensa efficacemente valori e si presta a essere ripetuta, memorizzata, citata: Rosso 2001). Nel Novecento, del resto, questo tipo di formula a effetto cambia (o meglio, amplia) destinazione d'uso, specializzandosi come strumento di propaganda o di lotta politica, utilizzato anche nel tifo calcistico, oltre che per caratterizzare e reclamizzare un prodotto. Dalla scrittura frammentaria d'autore, ci si sposta dunque nel terreno della scrittura tendenzialmente anonima ed esposta (sotto forma di iscrizioni sui muri, manifesti e tazebao, volantini, locandine, striscioni, annunci sui giornali, brochure, "santini" elettorali) e insieme dell'oralità gridata da militanti e ultrà, o declamata nei ritornelli delle pubblicità radiofoniche e televisive, pronta a entrare nel circuito discorsivo popolare.

This paper explores issues concerning personal agency in discursive psychology and discourse analysis, with a particular emphasis on agency in terms of motivational accounts of the person. Issues are discussed in relation to the efficacy, acceptability, and accessibility of discourse analytic research for the practising psychotherapist. We suggest that such an approach may raise problems in four areas. First, we argue that without explicit theorization of the subject as language user, discourse analysis may be vulnerable to the charge of determinism. Second, theorization of the subject as language user may be required to account successfully for individual consistency and continuity of identity. Third, although claiming to critique commonsense notions of subjectivity, implicit dualist assumptions facilitate a reading of discursive psychology that is compatible with a motivational model of the person. Finally, we argue that discursive psychology itself implies a particular model of the strategically motivated language user. We conclude that, although these issues require clarification, discursive psychology and discourse analysis have much to offer psychotherapy research.

Urban development agreements (UDAs) in Canada represented an innovative governance approach that involved all three levels of government and civil society organizations jointly deliberating and setting policy to address enduring and seemingly intractable issues like homelessness and economic development. By 2010, however, all UDAs in Canada have been terminated. This article applies a new institutionalism framework to analyse and explain the creation and termination of UDAs in Canada. First, I argue that the creation and termination of these institutions are most productively explained by applying both historical institutional and discursive institutional analytical frameworks. Second, I examine the specific UDAs in Vancouver and Winnipeg to illustrate the historical, institutional and ideational context under which they emerged. Finally, I consider the institutional termination literature to frame a discursive institutional analysis of the ‘death’ of UDAs in Canada, concluding that there was an ideational or discursive turn stemming not simply from political turnover, but cognitive (how to do it) and normative (what is appropriate) ideas.

This study explores the use of rhetorical figures in political party slogans in Turkey. In the first stage of the research, a content analysis establishes that the use of rhetorical figures in political party slogans is limited. Irony and metaphor appear to be the two most commonly used rhetorical devices in political party slogans. The Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, or AKP), which came to power in November 2002, 1 year after its establishment, tended to avoid rhetorical figures in its political campaigns in line with its positioning. It is established that the avoidance of the use of rhetorical figures in their slogans has helped the AKP emphasize the image and its positioning—a party of action without demagoguery and gossiping—it wanted to create in the minds of the voters.