The pragma-stylistics of ‘image macro’ internet memes

The year’s work in stylistics 2020

“…Online data is also analysed by Hadikin (2020), who uses corpus methods to examine the use of the ‘we’ pronoun on a citizen science forum, and by Djenar and Ewing (2020), who focus on the different uses of emoji in a Malaysian online community. Lugea (2020) applies principles of speech act theory to the internet meme, establishing core stylistic features in the ‘extreme rule-governed culture’ (Lugea, 2020: 103) of the meme and demonstrating how pragma-stylistic effects are achieved through the creative choices of meme authors. Tagg’s (2020) concluding chapter to this volume points out that media stylistics is continuously engaged with ‘traditional media’ alongside these new and developing datasets, and several chapters in the collection analyse newspaper language.…”

A Multimodal Analysis of Gender Representation in “Men vs. Women Memes”

“…They have started spreading rapidly across different social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. According to Lugea (2019), "the last two decades of the 20th Century saw the emergence of Memetics as a field dedicated to understand the spread of information and culture through memes" (p. 2). They have spurred the interest of scholars from different disciplines, such as culture studies, political science, media studies and computer science, thus rendering them a highly interdisciplinary issue.…”