POLITICAL SATIRE IN SIMPLICISSIMUS: LINGUISTIC DISCOURSE APPROACH

Abstract

The study of political satire in Russian, European and German scientific discourse has a long tradition. The article deals with genre-typological, linguistic-discourse and linguistic-cultural aspects of political satire media texts. The work studies patterns and dynamics of satirical genres evolution, taking various factors into consideration (development of mass print media, appeal to wider readership, and gradual transformation of the comic (satire) from a means of criticism into an instrument of entertainment or propaganda). The material for the study is a text corpus from Simplicissimus, a German illustrated satirical weekly magazine, published in Munich from 1896 to 1944. Over this period, important socio-political and historical events brought changes to the structure, subject matter and content of the publication. The main objects of this study are satirical letters, picture stories, aphorisms and cartoons as media texts pertaining to a certain period of time. A separate focus of the research is the development of the magazine itself as a mass media shaping public opinion. The study uses the DIMEAN multi-level model. Transtext, intratext and actor levels allow us to analyze language material in the context of modern linguistic concepts of discourse and text. The work also uses methods of contextual semantic and communicative-pragmatic analysis of language units. The linguistic analysis of the weekly’s publications provides an insight into the German political media discourse at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries from a new perspective, which is also of undoubted interest to the researchers of contemporary political satire in the framework of pragmalinguistic, cognitive, interdisciplinary etc. studies.

Keywords:

political satire, discourse analysis, media discourse, political discourse, text type