Reality television: a discourse-analytical perspective

Abstract

The empirical chapters of this book offer original studies of reality television (RTV henceforth) in a wide range of cultural contexts. Importantly, they all share a discourse-analytical approach even though they employ different discourse-analytic frameworks in order to address specific research questions, from multimodality and interactional sociolinguistics to Critical Discourse Analysis. The aim of this chapter is to explain the need, at this point in time, for a discourse-analytical approach within RTV scholarship. Doing so requires explaining our conceptualization of RTV as a discourse, one comprised of various genres. It also requires reviewing, albeit briefly, the two broad areas on which the empirical studies of RTV included in this book focus: identity and impoliteness.