
Carrying a Torch
The Beijing Olympic Torch Relay in the British and Chinese Media
Mei Yang(Author)
Peter Lang Verlag
Published on 8. September 2014
Book
Paperback/Softback
262 pages
978-3-0343-0925-7 (ISBN)
Description
The Olympic torch relay held before the 2008 Games was the moment when East met West on the media stage. This book analyses the torch relay and its representation, offering a discursive construction of Olympic ideology by and through the media in both East and West. The author argues that the discourse used by the media in different social contexts reflected the diversity of ideologies and cultural values with which the Olympic flame was imbued.
A corpus-based Discourse-Historical Approach in Critical Discourse Analysis (DHA-CDA) is applied to media discourse in the United Kingdom and in China to examine the complexity, contradiction and conflicts in linguistic interpretations of Olympic ideology. Corpora drawn from the China Daily, BBC News and The Guardian are described, interpreted in their linguistic contexts, and then explained in terms of the broader historical and socio-political contexts surrounding the dynamic life of the Olympic torch relay. This unique study sheds light on the significance of the Olympic Games for East-West media discourse and analysis.
Reviews / Votes
<<[Yang's] work provides a thoughtful, thorough examination of a non-Western media event.>>(Richard W Hallett, Linguist List)
More details
Series
Edition
New edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Peter Lang Group AG, International Academic Publishers
Edition type
New edition
Dimensions
Height: 225 mm
Width: 150 mm
Thickness: 16 mm
Weight
397 gr
ISBN-13
978-3-0343-0925-7 (9783034309257)
DOI
10.3726/978-3-0353-0398-8
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Mei Yang received her PhD from the University of Aberdeen. She is a lecturer at the School of Foreign Language Education, Jilin University and an external researcher at the Centre for Olympic Studies and Research, Loughborough University.
Content
Contents: Olympic torch relay in media discourse - The media and Olympism, Liberalism and Harmony - Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis - Frequency and concordance analysis - Re-examination of the historical and socio-political contexts of the 2008 torch relay.