Abstract
In this chapter, the author analyses the House of Cards series as a conventionally structured tale of the modern times, basing her study on Greimas’s actantial model. Sorlin highlights the pragmatic dimension of Greimas’s structure by giving pride of place to the speech acts that determine contractual relations between actants, thus transforming the structural narrative framework into a model of pragmatic interaction. She shows how the narrative structure is informed by ideological values that shape the characters’ ‘expressive’ and ‘relational’ identities. Focusing on Frank Underwood’s ‘mindstyle’, she brings out the diverse socio-cognitive metaphors that underlie his linguistic formulations, expressing his conception of the world and his place in it. A last part offers a multimodal study of the balance of power in the Underwood couple whose contractual relationship breaks up at the end of the third season.
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Notes
- 1.
Each reference indicates first the season (1, 2 or 3), then the precise chapter number of House of Cards it belongs to (1–39).
- 2.
Propp’s ultimate stocklist of actants is made up of seven character types: the villain, the donor, the helper, the sought-for person, the dispatcher, the hero and the false hero.
- 3.
Greimas (1986: 179) borrows the term Opposant (‘Opponent’) from Souriau and Adjuvant (‘Helper’) from Guy Michaud (preferring the latter to Souriau’s Rescousse).
- 4.
In Greimas’s literary semiotics, the concept of ‘actant’ replaces the term ‘character’ or even Propp’s notion of ‘dramatis persona’, for it can also refer to animals, objects and concepts. Besides, an actant is an empty space that can be occupied by diverse characters/actors (see Greimas & Courtès, 1993: 3).
- 5.
‘Functions of characters serve as stable, constant elements in a tale, independent of how and by whom they are fulfilled. They constitute the fundamental components of a tale’ (Propp, 1968: 21).
- 6.
This and the subsequent quotations follow the transcription conventions that figure in the Appendix. All the transcriptions (from DVDs) are mine.
- 7.
This conviction is shared by many proponents of Critical Discourse Analysis. Fairclough (1989: 36), for instance, sees political discourse as mediated by ideological institutions that assign people various ‘positions of power and knowledge’—‘discourse is dialogical, produced by and producing the social relations of addressors and addressees.’
- 8.
‘The interpellated reader, although subjected as much as subjectified, is not powerless. She sends back the force of interpellation as Perseus’s shield, held as a mirror, sent back the Gorgon’s gaze and petrified her’ (Lecercle, 1999: 116).
- 9.
I’m here referring to the distinction put forward by Culpeper in Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts (2001).The author distinguishes between ‘explicit characterisation cues, where we find characters explicitly presenting themselves or others—that is, making character statements about themselves or others’ and ‘implicit characterisation cues, where we have to infer (via causal schemas, for example) character information from linguistic behaviour’ (Culpeper, 2001: 164).
- 10.
After President Garret A. Walker’s resignation at the end of the second season, Vice President Underwood becomes president pro tempore. In the third season he seeks to be elected President.
- 11.
The DNC is the Democratic National Committee.
- 12.
The stylistic notion of ‘mindstyle’ borrowed from Fowler (1977: 103) refers to ‘any distinctive linguistic representation of an individual mental self’. The way a character linguistically constructs reality can betray underlying thought structures accounting for her moral values or prejudices, for instance. Although it concerns a character’s personal mental perspective, the notion is not impervious to sets of values shared by a whole group. As Gregoriou (2014: 266) indicates, ‘attitudes, beliefs, values and judgments’ can be shared by similarly minded individuals and thus the notion of ideology is ‘entangled’ with that of mindstyle.
- 13.
Bob Birch is Speaker of the House in the Democratic controlled House of Representatives in the first season.
- 14.
In grammar, the interpersonal metafunction is concerned with language as ‘enacting our personal and social relationships with the other people around us’. It deals with language as ‘action’ (informing, questioning, giving orders, making offers or expressing one’s appraisal of the other), hence the interactive nature of the interpersonal metafunction (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004: 29).
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Sorlin, S. (2016). Macrostructure and Linguistic Characterization. In: Language and Manipulation in House of Cards. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55848-0_2
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