The Chinese writer as empty signifier: a corpus-based analysis of the English-language reporting of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature

Abstract

This study examines the English-language reporting of the award in 2012 of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the Chinese author, Mo Yan. Through the corpus-based analysis of news reporting in four countries, the study found that Mo was discursively produced as an “empty signifier” through which significant cultural-political work was done in an attempt to make sense of and manage a resurgent China. Specifically, the global cultural event of the Nobel Prize in Literature was used in the USA, Australian, and French news media largely to reproduce the dominant human rights discourse in which China's dissidents were highly prominent and highly valued. In the news media of the more culturally proximate India, the literary achievement was given greater prominence. The study's keyword and concordance analyses found a high degree of commonality in the linguistic strategies through which China was represented. The findings revealed that the English-language reporting of the Nobel Prize was characterized by narrow cosmopolitanism, in which “they” were invited to become part of “our” free world.

Keywords::

• global news discourse
• cosmopolitanism
• media representation of China
• Mo Yan
• Nobel Prize in Literature
• corpus-based discourse analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Chinese-born Gao Xingjian in 2000. He was a French citizen at that time, however.

^2. Here we use the tool Wmatrix (Rayson, 2008) and the 2007 version of the British National Corpus (written in English) as the reference corpus.

^3. Note that statistical significance is not claimed for these patterns.

^4. Details on the log-likelihood calculations within Wmatrix, which we used in this study, are available at http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/llwizard.html.

^5. Because space is limited, only the two pairs “literature”/“literary” and “writer”/“writers” are examined here; “author” is not analyzed.

^6. Observation based on a search of the Brown Corpus via Sketch Engine. Retrieved from https://the.sketchengine.co.uk/bonito/run.cgi/first_form?corpname = preloaded/brown_1

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The National Social Science Foundation of China, [grant number 12AXW006].

Notes on contributors

Jing Xin

Jing Xin is a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Journalism and Communication, Wuhan University, China. PhD, BA (Hons.), Department of Media and Communication, University of Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand. She is the author of The Chinese Approach to Web Journalism. Her research interests include comparative journalism studies, cross-cultural communication studies, and journalism studies in new media.

Donald Matheson

Donald Matheson is an associate professor in Media and Communication at the University of Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand. He is the author of Media Discourses and the co-author of Digital War Reporting. He is co-editor of Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics and writes on journalism practice, with particular emphasis on digital developments, ethics and discourse practices.