Viral Discourse

edited by Rodney H. Jones

Are discourse analysts ‘essential workers’ [1]? (And who are they?) Is the war rhetoric around CoVID-19 an Anglo-American thing [5]? Could social semioticians (another profession I wasn’t aware of before) ever be of any use in the midst of a global emergency [10]?

I got this e-book as a freebie thanks to the British Council Spain. I tend to delete their newsletters without reading; I can’t explain why I didn’t do the same with the latest one. Given that all ten chapters are present, in some form, on the (no longer updated, I’m afraid) Viral Discourse blog, I wonder how many people would actually buy the book. Or read it. But I ended up finishing it in a couple of weeks, consuming it in small doses while queueing to the Ayuntamiento, or waiting for the bus to arrive, or the movie to start.

As one would expect from most of publications like that, Viral Discourse is quite a mixed bag. The chapters I enjoyed the most deal with comparative discourse analysis of pandemic coverage by the American, British and “don’t mention the war” German press [5], urban public signs in Golders Green, London [6], and the UK government’s notorious three-part slogans [9].

1. Rodney H. Jones. Introduction: Are Discourse Analysts ‘Essential Workers’?
2. Rodney H. Jones. The Veil of Civilization and the Semiotics of the Mask
3. Christoph A. Hafner. Communicating Expertise in the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Genre Analytical Perspective
4. Wing Yee Jenifer Ho. Face Masks and Cultural Identity on YouTube
5. Sylvia Jaworska. Investigating Media Representations of the Coronavirus in the UK, USA and Germany: What Can a Comparative Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis Contribute to Our Understanding of the COVID-19 Pandemic?
6. Zhu Hua. Sense and Sensibility: Urban Public Signs during a Pandemic
7. Erhan Aslan. When the Internet Gets ‘Coronafied’: Pandemic Creativity and Humour in Internet Memes
8. Carmen Lee. #HateIsAVirus: Talking about COVID-19 ‘Hate’
9. Rodney H. Jones. Order out of Chaos: Coronavirus Communication and the Construction of Competence
10. Elisabetta Adami. How to Make Sense of Communication and Interaction in a Pandemic