Investigating Conflict Discourses in the Periodical Press

If we recognize that a periodical champ does exist, then journals and reviews may no longer be relegated to the periphery of literature or art. The prestigious ‘little review’, which is supposed to have a very limited importance indeed within a larger context, is actually able to affect a system. Although ESPRit seems mainly to focus on the former aspects – the context dominated by specific editorial, economic, and entrepreneurial rules – this connection with a wide spectrum encompasses political, sociological and macroeconomic questions.

As the life of any review is obliged to reckon with everyday life commitments, it is even too easy to stress that language is one of the most important commitments. Maybe the fundamental one, the dominating one. The papers collected in this book are a good example of the existence of something like a ‘linguistic leadership’ which must be taken into account. What is very instructive, at least from the point of view of a literary scholar like me, is that a well-constructed linguistic examination is immediately on the prowl. The basic questions are caught directly; contrasts, conflicts, conundrums, and whatsoever, almost magically appear in front of us in their sheer essence. Questioning language means disclosing the kernel of a largely deployed structure.

All these essays share methods of critical discourse analysis. This kind of approach is affected both by the mastery of ancient rhetoric and by the modern tools of pragmalinguistics. Both disciplines deal with some general human attitudes as they are expressed through language. A linguistic act is an action interpreted in terms of words, clauses, propositions, texts, etc. Ancient and modern rhetoric reminds us that every utterance is joined to strategic and social procedures that condition it, even (or mainly) in absence of a kind of subjective awareness. So, discourse analysis draws from the (almost) non-historical sources of our experience. Its methods and principles deal with an a priori which cannot be discussed. Narrating, praising, arguing, describing… are linguistic universals. Just as the Latin genera, deliberativum, judiciale, epideicticum effectively describe some attitudes of public speech that still retain their importance – at least in a democratic context.

Periodicals may therefore be at the same time arenas of democracy and, dialectically speaking, of its negation. When China decides that national football policy must represent not only an economic investment but also a symbolic benchmark for a possible supremacy, the decision of shaping a sport reputation is not very far from a lie. Only an authoritarian strategy may aim at deceiving a population with the mirage of a football leadership. And when an Arab scholar investigates into how European journals report female struggles during the Arab Spring, she is supposed to judge the journals, their ideology, from the point of view of a very solid quantitative analysis as well as against the real, objective condition of women in Arab states. Likewise, if you want to understand the effectiveness of communication in front of the use of palm oil, for instance, you may discuss all the nuances of arguments and scientific descriptions, but you always have to remember that palm oil is the cheapest alimentary oil, and that this sheer fact matters.

I would argue that the actual contrast between linguistic universals and history needs the mediation of journals, at least in front of some everyday emergences, what we call ‘the news’. And a scientific analysis can reconstruct something which – in the limits of the democratic modern world – may look like truth. Language and discourse are the most important touchstones of the persisting actuality of these objectives. It is not by chance, I think, that all the essays published in this book rely upon national issues. In a global world, if you want to study the origins of a really shared public argumentation, you must start by looking at a national domain. Enlightenment has taught us that a national background can be the basis for a universal philosophy. Is it still the same for us? I think so. As long as national languages exist, the most violent contrasts will be active there: language being always able to mirror something outside of it, the essential actions and intentions of daily life.

From this point of view, a discursive analysis of periodicals may be regarded as the most direct way to seize ideological moves in a modern society. Literary and artistic procedures may be more dialectic and indirect in their surveys; they may detect what is not immediately visible, even what is wordless. Linguistics will never fail to deconstruct communicative practices, the seeming normality of which we accept without suspicion, but behind whose action something different (and, often, dangerous) is bound to be discovered.

I am sure that these peculiar attitudes are genetically related to the origins of periodical publications. The bearing of discourse analysis is optimism, I dare say. All the clues I have discussed so far suggest such a conclusion. “The circulation of periodicals multiplies those activities of the human mind on which the improvement of our ideas and customs depends”, wrote Cesare Beccaria in the pages of a seminal Italian review, Il Caffè, in 1764. Printed words, human minds and ideas: a connection exists which is liable to enhance a progress. For in periodicals the first engagement is debating the public interest, public opinion. These are the ideal roots of the periodical press, its original mission.

1 Analysing texts from the periodical press

Thomas Jefferson wrote “… were it left to me to decide whether we should have government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter” (letter to Edward Carrington, 16 January 1987, in Jefferson 1787/1955).

This statement testifies to the crucial importance attributed to the press in the period when the now universally accepted idea of its fundamental role in democracy was being established. A free press came to be considered a bulwark against despotism and a site for public debate through which the truth could be achieved and correct information provided to enable the public to form opinions and make informed political choices.