Publication details

Czenglish memes about this divný národ : Kavárna strikes back (or does it?)

Authors

SUČKOVÁ Magda

Year of publication 2018
Type Appeared in Conference without Proceedings
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Arts

Citation
Description Twitter and Facebook, apart from serving as platforms for fast (real and fake) news dissemination, political marketing and public discussion, have also become a site of political carnivalism. In this paper, I argue that CzenglishMemy, a Twitter and a Facebook profile with the subtitle Czenglish memes about this divný národ, may present a fine example of such political carnival site by combining images featuring current news stories with Czenglish captions. First, I analyze the linguistic and multimodal means through which the humorous effect is created (post-image-caption interplay, lexical choice, code-switching patterns, syntactic violations, etc.). Next, I discuss the target audience of the Czenglish memes and critically examine their potential impact. I argue that since the interpretation of the memes requires good proficiency in English (the access to which may still be a challenge outside of major cities in the Czech Republic), the intended political carnivalism remains but a creative word-play accessible mainly to the members of the privileged strata of Czech society.
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