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This chapter presents a number of conclusions about how a poet in an oral tradition may have formulated and generated the substantial stretches of speech that we encounter in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The first area of discussion is memory and discourse: the stylized speech-formats and question and answer patterns that we observe in Homer have their origins in the pre-patterned forms of everyday speech. The second area of discussion is discourse and gender. Here the evidence is not uniform. There are areas of consistency and inconsistency in Homer's representation of men's and women's talk in the worlds he describes.

This chapter situates the study of stance within major currents of sociolinguistic inquiry, including such topics as footing and framing, style and stylization, language ideologies, performance, and indexicality. It proposes that stance-based sociolinguistic analysis (1) situates linguistic acts of stance within the sociocultural matrices that give stances their social meanings; (2) explores how sociolinguistic indexicalities act as resource for and are potentially changed by acts of stancetaking; (3) takes account of language ideologies as both resources for the production and interpretation of stance and as potential stance objects; (4) focuses on the reflexive, metapragmatic, and “metasociolinguistic” dimension of human communication; and (5) treats speaker stance as a crucial component of interactional processes and practices that have long been a focus of sociolinguistic study.

Studies have shown that most Americans pay little attention to international affairs and do so only when the issues begin to impinge on their lives. Because of this naturally occurring localism, many Americans form their opinions on foreign policy based on information they get from so-called pundits and from the stylized news provided by media. However, this “out of sight, out of mind” attitude gives Americans a false sense of security and makes them vulnerable to manipulation. A recent example of the consequences of both a population's information dependence and media compliance with official deception can be found in the selling of the disastrous Second Gulf War. By implanting a stereotyped picture of the threat supposedly posed by Iraq in the minds of the citizens, the Bush administration was able to gain acceptance of the defense doctrine, called preemption.

This section discusses Jingju, which literally means “Beijing drama”, and is the Chinese word for the theatrical genre known in the West as “Peking/Beijing Opera”. It defines jingju as a total theatre which emphasizes stylization over realism. It includes the Chinese terms for jingju's four basic skills, translated by Elizabeth Wichman as “singing, speaking, dance-acting, and combat”. It elucidates that “dance-acting” includes pure dance and pantomime as well as the visible results of “acting” in the Western sense, while “combat” in this non-mimetic theatre encompasses stylized fighting with swords and spears, martial arts, and acrobatics. It further elucidates how performers and spectators approach jingju, what it meant to people at different times, and how it managed to evolve and survive throughout the twentieth century.

Chapter 1 shows how an incipient Jewish literary modernism based on the aesthetics of romantic nationalism was challenged by the emergence of avant-garde primitivist critique. The folklore-inspired Jewish literature of the turn of the twentieth century was influential culturally and politically, in its contribution to the formation of a modern Jewish literary canon. But it also prompted a backlash by members of the avant-garde who cast the Herderian folklorism of the neo-Romantics as mere “stylization” and called for the aesthetic, but not its subject matter, to be discarded. This critique opened the door to a Jewish primitivism that sought to push beyond neo-Romantic aesthetics while remaining ambivalent about its ethno-nationalist politics.

Maya Deren's writings on film provide the basis for considering her dancefilm works such as A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1945–1946). A pivotal figure in the history of dancefilm, Deren's films marked the re‐emergence of the form within the avantgarde for the first time since the experiments of the Futurists, Surrealists, and Dadaists earlier in the twentieth century. Operating outside the major American film studios, which were releasing their highest output of dance musicals, Deren was working with modern and untrained dancers to create choreographies for the screen. Deren realized seminal strategies for dancefilm in the mid‐twentieth century that can be found in the most recent examples of the form. Vertical film form is a concept developed by Deren to account for the different film structure in non‐narrative films—what she calls “poetic film.” Rather than progressing “horizontally” with the logic of the narrative, vertical films or sequences explore the quality of moments, images, ideas, and movements outside of such imperatives. Depersonalization refers to a type of screen performance that subsumes the individual into the choreography of the film as a whole. Actors become figures across whom movement transfers as an “event.” The manipulation of gestural action through stylization occurs through individual performances as well as cinematic effects, the two levels of filmic performance combining to create screen choreographies.

By relating Homer's speech-formats to cognitive psychology's account of the storage of implicit knowledge, conclusions can be drawn about the mind-based resources on which the poet drew as he sang—and on which we draw as we speak. It is argued that the Homeric rebuke was a stylized version of everyday discourse, cued by the rebuke format that the poet had acquired, almost unconsciously, early in life and stored in memory. What the apprentice poet learned from a master-singer was not the rebuke itself, but the special formulation of the rebuke for the purposes of oral song.

This chapter begins a study of the question forms in Homer. It represents an attempt to identify some of the habits that a poet within an oral tradition had to develop, and some of the techniques on which he came to rely, in order to generate works on a monumental scale. The chapter offers an account of the observable regularities in question forms in Homer's Odyssey: exemplary adjacency pairs, careful use of explanatory material, a predictable range of options for the presentation of question-strings, whether double or multiple questions, and the answers they attract. Stylized rhythmical and structural patterns based on everyday talk have been developed by the tradition to facilitate and sustain poetic composition in an oral context.

This chapter studies a phenomenon first observed by Samuel Bassett in questions and answers in the Homeric epics: the poet's preference for spelling out a twofold instruction, proposal, or question, and in a subsequent passage reversing the original order of presentation. It discusses the ‘device’ in the context of the Odyssey. There are two findings: first, that this practice of answering questions in an order that reverses the order of asking is motivated both by cognitive factors and, following Schegloff and Sacks, social factors; and, second, that, since hysteron proteron is a feature of oral discourse more generally, oral poets in this tradition observed an everyday practice, and mimicked it in stylized form in their songs.

Harold Prince wanted to shake up facile assumptions about fascism and guilt, and he quickly scored a coup in rehearsals by drawing a parallel between the racial unrest and persecution of black Americans at the time and the street gang thuggery of Nazi Germany. Prince achieved a symbolic edge after breaking down barriers between musical stylization and realistic drama. This chapter explores Prince's rehearsal methods that sought to elicit spontaneity and authenticity. It presents specific examples of the director's use of rigorous textual analysis and his attention to practical matters, such as the shape and color of a prop, the beats and tempi of speech and song, the spatial relationships between decor and actors, subtext, and the total stage picture. Actors' concerns, as well as those of choreographer Ron Field and composers John Kander and Fred Ebb, are highlighted, as are problems with the musical's structure, leading to a radical change before the Boston opening and that city's critical reception.

Set in larger, persisting communicative situations, rhetorical discourse often features language attributed to other speakers and texts. Speaking for others was especially important in ancient forensic settings where witness testimony was reported secondhand. The methods described in this chapter for incorporating language from other sources follow those in Leech and Short's Style in Fiction. Other voices can be quoted directly, though always with selection and often with stylization, or they can be quoted indirectly. Indirect quotation invites paraphrase that can wander tendentiously from the original wording, and, as it appears in written texts, indirect quotations often include zones of ambiguous attribution. The words or near-words of others can also be abandoned in favor of reporting the speech act achieved by their words. Written texts may be represented using the same options of direct or indirect quotation, or the reporting of speech acts, each of these options increasing the interpretive control of another text. Speakers, of course, without the benefit of quotation marks, have to rely more on vocal dynamics to mark off another's words. The rhetorical manuals favored the dramatic mimicking of other voices (prosopopoeia), going so far as to recommend that the absent, the dead, and even inanimate entities be given a voice in a speech. Bakhtin noted the extremes of language mixtures as the heteroglossia that can result from the often unattributed incorporation of others’ language, even to the point of the double voicing of a single word. In a new media age of IM and blogs, such multivoicing has in fact become routine.

This chapter examines acts of stance by comedian Wonho Chung and his YouTube audience as they negotiate ideologies of language, race, and nation in the Arab world. Specifically, it focuses on how Chung, an Arab-English bilingual of East Asian descent, humorously invokes stereotypes of an Oriental, and how his audience, largely Arab-identifying YouTube users residing in over fifty countries, position themselves in relation to these stereotypes. The chapter notes the potential for Chung to critique Orientalism through his humor and for YouTube spaces to encourage linguistically and geographically diverse individuals to collaboratively take positive stances toward Arabic and Arab culture. Yet it also identifies ways in which Chung's comedic performance and his audience's responses ultimately reinscribed essentialist notions of Arabness and racist ideologies of Orientalism.

This chapter examines how George A. Romero's Creepshow (1982) integrates EC's comic book visual style. At the same time as Romero and Stephen King were building upon EC's moral themes by introducing their own preoccupations, what they were also attempting was to create a film that integrated horror cinema and the visual look of EC comics. Interviewed in 1982, Romeo claimed that although it was ‘the irreverence and that graphic nature of the comics’ that attracted him to EC, the influence of EC in Creepshow ‘is not so much visual’. It is possible therefore that it was King who was initially the greater advocate for including comic book stylizations, since they were ‘very specifically planned and spelled out in the shooting script’. Although the influence of EC visuals was apparently of lesser importance to Romero initially, in its conception Creepshow was designed to ape the style of the comics to which it was an homage, and Romero certainly embraced this in the shooting, deliberately introducing moments that foreground a comic book visual style, including animated sequences, an expressionist use of colour at key moments, and the replication of the experience of reading a comic book through the use of panels within frames, gutters, and comic book style shot transitions.

Chapter 2 examines the entextualization of queerqueen Japanese into multimodal texts that endeavor to (re)create sonic qualities through visual means. It examines five books published in 1979–1980 by twin brothers Osugi (Sugiura Takaaki, cinema critic; 1945–) and Peeco (Sugiura Katsuaki, fashion critic; 1945–) that employ the taidan (conversational dialogue) format and incorporate illustrations from leading graphic artists. In a “boom” of popularity, Osugi and Peeco were renowned for their playful banter and were labeled the okama (pejorative slang for “fag/faggot/poofter”) twins. The rich textual fields of the books combine layout and graphic design with metalinguistic annotation and nonconventional orthography provided via stenography, transcription, and editing. Through visual mimesis and orthographic stylization, the “excessive” nature of the talk is visually highlighted. Censorship tropes visually mark that which must be contained. Spoken interactions emergent in “actual” conversations are thus entextualized and function as precursor for later articulations of queerqueen booms.

Chapter 3 explores shifting processes of enregisterment through analysis of onē-kyara-kotoba (queen-personality-talk) as written into impact-captions in lifestyle television during the queen-personality boom (middle of the first decade of the 2000s). In makeover media of this period, queen-personalities were proof that readers and viewers alike could remake themselves into a newer and better “me” by applying hard work and dedication to fashion, cosmetics, culinary skills, and interpersonal relationships. Manipulation of language resources and metapragmatic stereotypes of femininity and masculinity are fundamental to processes through which the desire to transform is created. Taking the lifestyle variety television show onēMANS (NTV) as the main focus, the chapter analyzes how the look and the sound of the queerqueen is recontextualized into a heteronormative framework through manipulation of font, animation, color, and orthographic stylization in impact-captions. Editorial interventions inscribe the sonic qualities of queen-personality talk in ways that simultaneously celebrate their transformational power and threaten to expose their (in)authenticity.