عنوان

Analysing fragmented narratives :

Number

TLets748019

Title Proper

Analysing fragmented narratives :

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Sadler, Neil

Title Proper by Another Author

Twitter reporting of the 2013 military intervention in Egypt

Subsequent Statement of Responsibility

Mostafa, Dalia ; Baker, Mona

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

University of Manchester

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2017

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Thesis (Ph.D.)

Text preceding or following the note

2017

Text of Note

This thesis develops a theoretical approach grounded in socio-narrative, narratological and new media theory for the analysis of Twitter and explores how such an approach can help us to better understand the processes of narrative production and reception on Twitter in the context of three key events in recent Egyptian history all of which took place in 2013: the 30 June protests, 3 July ouster of President Mohamed Morsi and 14 August clearance of Muslim Brotherhood protests. Combining a constructivist, socio-narrative epistemology and ontology with narratological analytical tools, it analyses the tweets of three prominent Egyptian Twitter users writing in English and Arabic who rejected the hegemonic Muslim Brotherhood- and Military-sponsored narratives of the period: @Sandmonkey, @Zeinobia and @Bassem_Sabry. It uses the narratological concepts of authorship, readership and narrative structure to identify subtle formal differences between the tweets of each writer, employing socio-narrative theory to identify the implications of such differences for our understanding of the key events that took place in the summer of 2013 in Egypt and of the functioning of narrative on Twitter in general. I argue that Twitter users produce chronicles in their tweets which are developed into loose narratives by readers in the act of interpretation, rendering them highly dynamic. I propose that reader impressions of authors and the implied reader positions offered to them, aspects of storytelling largely ignored in the Twitter literature, greatly influence this process of constructive interpretation. The present study highlights the complexity of multilingual narrative production and reception during the period under study and challenges reductive metanarratives of polarisation promoted by both the Egyptian Military and Muslim Brotherhood.

Journalism ; Narratology ; Storytelling ; Narrative ; Egypt ; Twitter

Sadler, Neil

Mostafa, Dalia ; Baker, Mona

University of Manchester

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y