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Article published In: Chronotopes and the COVID-19 Pandemic
Edited by Anna De Fina and Sabina M. Perrino
[Language, Culture and Society 4:2] 2022
► pp. 218–241

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Stance-taking towards chronotopes as a window into people’s reactions to societal crises

Balcony performances in Italy’s lockdown

ORCiD logo with link | Georgetown University
Published online: 25 November 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lcs.22006.def
Abstract
The focus of this article is the analysis of stance taking vis-à-vis a chronotope born during the Covid-19 pandemic as a window into how people react to global crises and into the kinds of values that get an uptake and become widely shared in periods of unrest. I focus on Twitter users’ reactions in relation to a “chronotope of the balcony performances” that developed in Italy during the national lockdown. I analyze the stances that participants express towards the chronotope itself and a variety of objects related to it, and the semiotic resources that they recruit to do so. I show how a general positive reaction to the chronotope is related to the balcony performances being seen as expressing solidarity. Data for the paper come from 110 top tweets resulting from a search based on the presence of chronotope-related words and 95 tweets responding to one of the original tweets.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Chronotopes and their historical embedding
  • 3.Stance in the evaluation of chronotopes
  • 4.The chronotope of the balcony performances in Italy
  • 5.Data and methodology
  • 6.Analysis
    • 6.1Analysis of the original corpus
    • 6.2Analysis of reactions to one of the original Tweets
  • 7.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
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