|
|
I chose to concentrate my efforts on offering a comparison of discourses on a wide range of subjects, but in order to be able to do so in the confines of this study, I only included media discourse into my sample. The result is four case studies, which show that a particular narrative of what it means to be German can be traced across a range of different subject contexts. The four subject contexts I chose to discuss in this book, as seen in the four case studies, are the following: (1) European integration, (2) citizenship and immigration, (3) international football tournaments, and (4) food culture. We can see the struggle between ethnic and civic concepts of German identity in media coverage of all four subjects, and I try to show their discursive overlaps throughout the text.
While the four case studies in this book allowed me to compare the political with the seemingly nonpolitical, the decision to look at a range of different subjects meant that I was in danger of not being able to do justice to them all. While highlighting the ways in which discourses overlap, I also aim to show how media discourse on each particular subject has its very own characteristics. Readers who want to find out how the German press reports on European Union (EU) summit proceedings and citizenship reform can go straight to chapters 1 and 2. Readers interested in media coverage of popular entertainment and consumer culture can go straight to the case study on football reporting in chapter 3, or the study on restaurant reviews in chapter 4. I embedded the discussion of each of the four case studies in a literature review, which highlights main arguments relevant to each subject context. This allows me to show how my research findings relate to wider academic debates. Scholars in media and cultural studies—and also in politics, history, anthropology, and sociology, to name but a few—have written extensively on my four chosen subject contexts, and they might feel that I have barely touched upon the surface of what their discipline has to contribute to each debate. I tried my best to do justice to the literature on each subject, but as I tell my students, there is always more to read; I hope that the individual case studies in this book encourage readers to find out more about a particular subject of which I could only outline some key debates.