Stance-taking towards chronotopes as a window into people’s reactions to societal crises
Balcony performances in Italy’s lockdown
The focus of this article is the analysis of stance taking vis-à-vis a chronotope born during the Covid-19
pandemic as a window into how people react to global crises and into the kinds of values that get an uptake and become widely
shared in periods of unrest. I focus on Twitter users’ reactions in relation to a “chronotope of the balcony performances” that
developed in Italy during the national lockdown. I analyze the stances that participants express towards the chronotope itself and
a variety of objects related to it, and the semiotic resources that they recruit to do so. I show how a general positive reaction
to the chronotope is related to the balcony performances being seen as expressing solidarity. Data for the paper come from 110 top
tweets resulting from a search based on the presence of chronotope-related words and 95 tweets responding to one of the original
tweets.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Chronotopes and their historical embedding
- 3.Stance in the evaluation of chronotopes
- 4.The chronotope of the balcony performances in Italy
- 5.Data and methodology
- 6.Analysis
- 6.1Analysis of the original corpus
- 6.2Analysis of reactions to one of the original Tweets
- 7.Discussion and conclusions
- Acknowledgements
-
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► pp. 222 ff.
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