Anotace
The primary focus of this course is to familiarise students with a choice of analytical tools and frameworks available for news text analysis from various standpoints (social and political sciences, linguistics, stylistics, media studies, etc.). The overall criticality of developing practical analytical skills for interacting with media messages cannot be overstated, considering current international affairs (Russia’s war with Ukraine and its resultant consequences, climate crisis, global inflation — all this included). Moreover, political and news discourses are substantially interwoven; they both construct social realities, shape public policies, and represent the goings-on in the world in diverse ways. To top it all, the technological advances of the last few decades have also played a critical role in how traditional and new media function. Coupled with opportunities presented by social media, news discourse can be taken metaphorically as a battlefield of contrasting social realities constructed by the media. From there, there’s the need for critical approaches to analysing and decoding news ideological effects.
Throughout the course, in agreement with students, there will be chosen currently running or recently taken place news events within EU-Russia relations that will be studied and analysed in class, given the framework relevant to the seminar. Individually and in groups, students are expected to closely examine a selection of news at various levels, whether it be structural, stylistic/linguistic, cultural, symbolical, political, etc. The end goal of such exercises is to identify ideological effects encoded into news text on multiple planes plus to uncover the complexities of news production that experiences paradigm shifts with the rise of the Internet.