Page 160 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

MODE OF ADDRESS

individual texts are irreducibly empirical – you can prod them – so the
practice of ‘close textual reading’, as done by cultural analysts since
Richard Hoggart, is itself an empirical method. However, it is directed
not towards generalisable but particularistic results. There are frequent
squabbles between ‘empiricists’ and ‘textualists’, because although
both are interested in an empirical object of study, the method chosen
in each case is very different.
Quantitative, qualitative, ethnographic and ‘textual’ methods are all
necessary in the overall methodology of cultural, communication and
media studies. Hartley (1996) proposed that it is often more
appropriate to employ what Paula Amad (1994) has called ‘theory
shopping’ to chose the right method for a given inquiry. This is not to
be understood as an excuse for ‘anything-goes postmodernism’.
Rather it encourages the use of a judicious mix of theory and other
approaches so as to avoid some of the all-too-familiar end results that
plague many investigations.

See also: Audiences, Content analysis, Effects, Ethnography,
Participant observation

Further reading: Berger (2000); Corner (1998)

METONYMY

A term from rhetoric where part stands for whole. ‘The Crown’ stands
for the monarchy. Metonym works the other way round also, where
whole stands for part. ‘The USA’ might refer to the government of that
country, or its basketball team or a presidential opinion. Metonymy may
be used to identify a significant function (‘hand’ for labourer, ‘squeeze’
for partner). Along with metaphor, metonym was thought by the
linguist Roman Jakobson to be a fundamental mode of meaning-
creation. Where metaphor works though choice substitution (‘ice’ for
‘diamonds’), metonym works along the chain of signification (the
syntagm as opposed to the paradigm). Jakobson thought that realistic
novels were metonymic – part of life standing for its entirety. News is
metonymic on the same principle (whereas drama may be metaphoric).

MODE OF ADDRESS

A concept referring to those processes that take place within a text to
establish a relationship between the addresser and the addressee. It

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