The Department of Languages and Literature would like to invite you to the following lecture in their Lecture Series 2014/15.
'Shaken… and stirred: different degrees of “Bondness” through discourse analysis'
Paola Attolino, University of Salerno, Italy
Tuesday 5th May 2015
9:30-11:00
Room M106
As genre films, the Bond movies have been consistently successful since the 1960s, winning the approval of several generations and audiences. Like it or not, Bond has been part of popular culture for half a century. The movies have effectively negotiated changes in film culture finding the right balance between repetition and variation, continuity and change.
On the one hand the narrative formula has remained constant: audience have come to expect the familiar situations such as 007’s briefing by M, his visit to Q’s workshop, the seduction of the girl, the first meeting with the villain and the scene where he finally reveals his grand design to Bond. On the other hand, the plasticity of 007 persona has permitted his migration into different contexts, reflecting not only changes in the international geopolitical situation (from the Cold War period to the new world), but also in popular culture.
The aim of the lecture is to analyse to what extent these changes are linguistically represented in the film, examining how stylistic changes in discourse as well as the use of topical allusions, jokes and puns have mirrored world events and popular culture, in an attempt to trace an evolution of 007 from a diachronic perspective.
The ongoing study approach the entire Bond corpus, consisting of the transcripts from the 007 films released so far. The analysis will be limited to a selection of crucial scenes where the villain is portrayed and a number of episodes suggesting a significant shift in the use of topical allusions.