| Summary: | The thesis analyses at the discursive construction of national identities in the media, using Scotland as the case study. It focuses on the dialectic of the national Self and its Others and looks at the identity constructions in the two main Scottish broadsheets, the (<i>Glasgow</i>) <i>Herald </i>and the <i>Scotsman. </i>The two key discourse moments chosen for analysis are the 1979 and 1997 devolution referenda in Scotland. The thesis has three main strands of analysis. Firstly, the thesis looks at the Self/Other dialectic in the media. It challenges the view that the Other is always negative and stresses the role of positive Others in national identity construction process. The aim of the analysis of media discourse is to identify various significant Others in the discursive construction of Scottishness. Secondly, it looks at the complex and often ambiguous use of various national deixes in the Scottish media, focusing on personal deixis ‘we’, and other important words like ‘people’, ‘nation’, ‘country’, ‘land’, ‘history’ etc. Thirdly, it uses elements of visual sociology (including content and semiotic analysis) to look at the representations of Scottishness in political cartoons in a number of Scottish and British daily newspapers. The thesis combines elements of discourse analysis, content analysis, visual sociology, and nationalism studies in order to achieve these goals and hopes to achieve a better understanding of the Self/Other dialectic and the role of national deixes in national identity building and preserving.
|
|---|
