Critical Discourse Studies of Popular Culture and National Identity Construction: The Case of Germanness in the Context of the Greek Debt Crisis.

In this paper, I advocate for advancing Critical Discourse Studies of Popular Culture by integrating perspectives from Cultural Studies, particularly their emphasis on examining how popular culture shapes social reality. The proposed research enterprise focuses on the construction of Germanness using two examples from Greek popular culture discourse during the debt crisis: an infotainment website article and a TV sketch comedy. The analysis reveals that the dominant discourses – previously framing news coverage of the Southern European debt crisis – are recycled. However, as these discourses shift from news media to entertainment, they become naturalized and trivialized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]