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Dialect Enregisterment In Performance, Barbara Johnstone

Barbara Johnstone

In recent work I have been exploring how one set of linguistic forms has become enregistered as the dialect known as “Pittsburghese” ( Johnstone 2007a; 2007b; 2009; Johnstone, Andrus, and Danielson 2006). In this paper I analyze dialect enregistration in highly self-conscious performances of Pittsburgh speech and social identity. My data consists of three comedy sketches performed by the cast of WDVE radio’s “’DVE Morning Show.” One, called “Mother”, alternates lines of a somewhat parodically sentimental song about the singer’s mother with spoken-word illustrations by a “mother” character who uses elements of Pittsburgh-sounding speech. The second is an advertisement for …

Zizek/Questions/Failing, Nick J. Sciullo

Nick J. Sciullo

In this article I am primarily concerned with presenting Slavoj Žižek3 as a legal theorist. Žižek has been a valuable contributor to critical theory and deserves a place in the pantheon of legal thinkers.

While his diverse writings are often relegated to other disciplines, they also position him as an important contributor to law and public discourse. I seek to illuminate how he mediates and interrogates the law by demonstrating how his scholarship is important to the lives of legal thinkers, questions of success and the law, capitalism, political practice, and terrorism. Because Žižek’s work is interdisciplinary and expansive, this …