Serious Grappling with Satire

Rhetorical Genre Affordances and Invitations to Participation in Public Controversy

Bibliographic Data

ID21684353
AuthorsTommy Bruhn (0000-0003-3131-0856, Twitter (United States)), Joanna Doona (0000-0001-6093-0881, Twitter (United States))
Year2022
Volume29
Issue3
Pages284-300
Publication date2022-07-03
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJavnost - The Public (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1318-3222 • E-ISSN: 1854-8377
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13183222.2021.1983303
OpenAlexW3208434779
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited29

Rhetorical genres play a structuring role in public discourse by framing issues and influencing argumentation norms. In public controversy, struggles for dominance between genre frameworks can accompany substantive argumentation. This article presents a case study of the interconnected controversies about the Swedish school application system and public service legitimacy following a news satire programme Svenska Nyheter episode. It introduced a web tool simplifying applications, circumventing what was argued to be segregating effects of a fragmented first-come-first-serve system. The satiric framing invited carnivalesque civic engagement, while the private school sector’s response promoted a forensic debate on the programme’s legitimacy, with its own invitational pull. While these competing genres dominated different institutional media arenas, they significantly blended in online civic participation. Satirising techniques were appropriated to create agency in the “serious” forensic discourse and vice versa, indicating that boundaries of carnivalesque and serious modes are not as maintained by engaged citizens as by institutional actors

Aesthetics · Argumentation theory · Carnivalesque · Citizen journalism · Epistemology · Legitimacy · Linguistics · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Rhetorical question · Sociology · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · History · Humor Studies and Applications · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Law

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Open DOIOpen Access