"Mashup of Discourses: A Critical Analysis of the Videotext, 'Dream America Movie'"

About the Author

A teacher of writing and multimedia texts for nearly 30 years, Nancy Fox is working on her Ph.D. in English at the University of Washington in Seattle where she serves as Associate Director of the Expository Writing Program. She holds an M.A. in Rhetoric and Writing Studies from San Diego State University, where she initiated the use of visual text construction as a mode of teaching argumentation and rhetorical strategy to first-year composition students. Her abiding interest is in the development of a Critical Discourse Analysis that addresses the complexities of multimodal texts by student composers in particular.

Contents

Introduction

Part 1

Part 2

Conclusion

Appendix

Bibliography

Conclusion: Where Semiotics and Mashup Meet: A New Critical Discourse Analysis

This proposed model, repaired for CDA of videotexts on the basis of van Leeuwen’s framework for analysis of visual texts and legitimation, with salient elements from Remix Theory, productively analyzes Caylee’s videotext, “Dream America Movie,” as discourse that enacts her identity as a member of an identified network of “mashup” culture as well as a constitutive text of that discourse as well as the larger, more traditional ideology of America. As noted, this model of analysis opens a space for traditional linguistic theory, derived from Michael Halliday, to enter the realm of visual imagery through the experimental research of Theo van Leeuwen and enact the kinds of multimodal analysis that both van Leeuwen and O’Halloran insistently summon. But what seems most useful about the CDA attempted here is its incorporation of Remix Theory which serves to connect academic inquiry to the sphere of digital technology which is constitutive of this text in a cultural discourse known as “mashup.” It is clear, through this brief analysis, that Caylee’s videotext conjoins both discourses and cannot be analyzed in its realization of meaning and social significance by one in the absence of the other.

It’s interesting that Caylee’s “Dream America Movie,” while multimodal in a way that Remix Theory calls “cutting edge,” is multivocal and heteroglossic as well. It uses powerful American ideographs and icons such as the flag and the red-white-and-blue (and, while not analyzed in this brief study, the statue of liberty and bald eagle as well) in a creative way, challenging them by media images that depict a dystopian reality of violence, war, and social ills. Such images, drawn from emergent semiotic resources such as YouTube and news websites, and “remixed” and “repurposed” as a cohesive videotext through Microsoft Moviemaker and YouTube—thus never achieving identity as a material object in the physical sphere, and only “material” in the virtual sense, on the computer screen—appear, through such new media, to be more radical and subversive than in fact they actually are. However brief this CDA of “Dream America Movie” must necessarily, in this context, be, it nonetheless reveals the hegemony of standard American ideologies of patriotism and American stereotypes of both gender and race, none of which appear to be the concepts or practices challenged in this videotextual argument. While it is clear that Caylee uses specific visual content to comment on errors of leadership and perhaps betrayal of American ideologies by certified figures of authority, it is not evident that deeper inequalities subtending that “Dream America” are part of her critique. Rather, it appears that this videotext is itself “unaware” of the potent and prevailing images of violent males and victimized females, of black servitude or social deletion, that such multimodal texts may reproduce as part of the “silent” discourse of America that we see but fail to mark.

As O’Halloran et al. note, “We are expanding the potential for discourse analysts to create multimodal metadiscourse about (multimodal) discourse, and to critically reflect upon and enact metadiscursive academic- social practices” (25). I hope this early attempt at CDA which invites analytical frames from both academic and digital spheres to apprehend the multimodal videotext, such as Caylee’s “Dream America Movie,” will serve as one initial offering in our ways of talking about and understanding these complex and dynamic new discourses that reflect a transformation in our literacy, and an expansion of the definition of our material world.