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Language in Place: Stylistic perspectives on landscape, place and environment
Edited by Daniela Francesca Virdis, Elisabetta Zurru and Ernestine Lahey
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature 37] 2021
► pp. 125–146

Chapter 7
(Re)mapping “authentic” London

Iain Sinclair’s London Overground (2015) and the semiotic landscape of London’s East End

| Anglistisches Seminar, Universität Heidelberg

Busse and Warnke’s (2015) Urban Linguistic research paradigm is a seminal and precise answer to recent calls for interdisciplinary investigations of urban space/place that include semiotic and linguistic aspects. The methodological, technical and technological consequences of implementing interdisciplinary urban research, however, are manifold and highly complex. This exploratory case study is an attempt to showcase qualitative analyses of how ‘place-making practices’ (cf. Busse and Warnke 2015) manifest in two urban data types. Ideally, such small-scale investigations need to be complemented and contextualised by further quantitative methods and big data sets, such as the heiURBAN corpus by Busse (cf. e.g., Busse 2020). This chapter combines literary analysis of Iain Sinclair’s London Overground (2015) with descriptions of the semiotic landscape of Shoreditch, one of the most prominent gentrifying/gentrified neighbourhoods in London’s East End. It is embedded into my doctoral research of Shoreditch’s semiotic landscape and the analysis hints at how urban places are situated in discourses of urbanity, gentrification, change, authenticity, and commodification. The scope of this article remains small and exploratory but provides insight into some of the aforementioned methodological issues as well as an outlook of what further investigations may focus on.

Keywords: place-making, authenticity, declarative speech acts, urbanity model, semiotic landscape
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical deliberations: Making (urban) places
  • 3.Sinclair’s London
  • 4.The semiotic landscape of Shoreditch
  • 5.Literary place-making in London Overground
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 15 April 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.37.07smi
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