Language and Public Culture

Language and Public Culture is a resource for the study of English. The result of two courses taught by the author at Sapienza University of Rome, the book draws on a variety of texts to enhance students' critical reading skills. The volume is divided into two parts and approaches linguistic analysis from the vantage point of recent debates on key cultural issues, such as power and gender. Part I, "Political Language and Phantasy," discusses twentieth-century controversial figures of British Prime Ministers. Part II, "Masculinity, Femininity, and the Language of the Press," takes on gender representations in verbal and visual media texts and includes discussions of key twentieth-century American writers like Susan Sontag and Joan Didion.

The book has a two-part structure. In Part I, “Political Language and Phantasy,” I draw on the resources of psychoanalysis to discuss the language and persona of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, I propose that political discourse is a public version of the individual drama of an ego that, by saying ego, comes into public being. Following up on this analysis, Part II of the book invites students who, in the majority of cases, had not been exposed to discussions of gender, to analyse verbal and visual texts to see how they enforce certain dominant views of identities of masculinity and femininity.