During a global pandemic, the great impact of populist discourse on the construction of social reality is undeniable. This study analyzes the fantasmatic dimension of political discourse from Donald Trump’s and Jair Bolsonaro’s Twitter accounts between 1 March and 31 May. To do so, it applies a Clause-Based Semantic Text Analysis (CBSTA) methodology that categorizes speech in Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) triplets. The study findings show that in spite of the Coronavirus pandemic, the main beatific and horrific subjects remain the core populist signifiers: the people and the elite. While Bolsonaro’s narrative was predominantly beatific, centered on the government, Trump’s was mostly horrific, centered on the elite. Trump signified the pandemic as a subject and an enemy to be defeated, whereas Bolsonaro portrayed it as a circumstance. Finally, both leaders defined the people as working people, therefore their concerns about the pandemic were focused on the people’s ability to work.
This paper presents a joint study of two volumes of contemporary Argentine crónicas: Los suicidas del fin del mundo (2005), by Leila Guerriero, and Viajera crónica (2011), by Hebe Uhart. It argues that both authors adopt a “political commitment” (Caparrós 2008) by challenging the homogenizing hegemonic discourses about Argentine cultural identity through a dialogic narrative (Bakhtin 1986) which problematizes its complexities and contrasts, exposing the tensions between centers and peripheries. Overall, it examines how these books contest dominant perspectives by depicting socio-political dynamics (Guerriero) and linguistic practices (Uhart) utilizing three intertwined types of discourse: a) the chronicler’s gaze and first hand observations, b) written documented sources, and c) people’s testimonies recovered from real life interactions.
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