Transcript File
Key Question: What linguistic features and techniques are used to represent gender? Re-read either Daily Mail article, or opening to Mrs. Dalloway. Don't judge us on looks, says MP Louise: Tory condemns 'trivialisation' of women politicians in magazine interview • Is the Daily Mail article sexist? • Are its comments – sexist or not – directed at women, or just Louise Mensch? • What language choices/techniques can you point to as evidence? These are the photos included in the Mail article, taken of Mensch during the GQ shoot and interview; the headline above is from the Mail article. Point of interest: What does “mensch” mean in English? What linguistic features and techniques are used to represent gender? Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning — Ecriture fresh as if issued to childrenfeminine on a beach. Literally “women’s writing”; but the term was coined by For French feminists who were interested ina little squeak of What a lark! What a plunge! so it had always seemed to her, when, with non-standard forms and styles the hinges, whichfinding/developing she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the of open air. How fresh, how calm, this of course, the air was in the writing, because they feltstiller thatthan “standard” early morning; like the flap ofwas a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp language inherently sexist/gendered. Theyand yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that new ways of writing/speaking something awful thought was aboutthat to happen; looking at the flowers, at thewould trees with the smoke equate to new ways of perceiving the world. You winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the was that it?—“I men to cauliflowers”— was that it? do vegetables?”— not have to be a woman to prefer “do” ecriture He must have saidfeminine”. it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace — Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished — how strange it was!— a few sayings like this about cabbages. What can you say about the language choices in this extract? (Think, particularly, about verb processes; also, about noun and adjective choices.) Is the lang. particularly or essentially female/feminine/feminist? • Stative verbs/participles • Free indirect discourse/stream of consciousness (temporal experience rather than “movement” of plot...) • H/W: Answer today’s Key Question, analysing the Virginia Woolf extract. Be specific about word classes, dynamic/stative verbs, pre/post-modification.