Mediated stylistics

Mediated stylistics or media stylistics is a new and still emerging approach to the analysis of media texts (e.g. news programs, newspaper articles). It aims to take seriously two ideas: first, that media texts involve 'the construction of stories by other means'; and second, that in an age marked by digital connectivity, media texts are inherently interactive phenomena. To meet this twofold aim, mediated stylistics has brought together the analytic toolkits of discursive psychology—which is finely attuned to the contextual specificities of interaction—and stylistics—which is finely attuned to the grammatical/rhetorical/narratorial specificities of texts as texts. Recent research in which mediated stylistics has been put to work, for instance, has shown how mediated representation of issues like sexism, sexualisation, alleged rape and violence against women can differ, and differ in rhetorically consequential ways, from the original un-mediated source material. As a broadly ethnomethodological approach, mediated stylistics is strongly influenced by discursive psychology (DP), as well as the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), membership categorization analysis (MCA), and the work of stylisticians like Mick Short, Paul Simpson and Lesley Jeffries, in which the analytic utility of stylistics for an understanding of data other than strictly 'literary' texts becomes immediately apparent. What unites these approaches is their rejection of a particularly widespread understanding of language in which words-in-here-on-a-page name things-out-there-in-the-world. Because this understanding assumes a natural link between descriptions and the events so described it also assumes a non-linguistic sense of the world as the final arbiter of the in/accuracy of descriptions. For DP, SSK and MCA, however, there can be no socially meaningful sense of the non-linguistic without the founding, constitutive force of language. Although language might not be all there is in the world, it is, nevertheless, all there is in the world that allows for the world to become accountable and knowable to ourselves and others.