Focusing on an analysis of editorials from The New York Times and Le Monde, as well as of those published in three Russian newspapers (Izvestija, Nezavisimaja Gazeta, and Segodnja) from 1999 to 2001, The spiral ‘anti-Other rhetoric’: Discourses of identity and the international media echo aims to explain how the phenomenon of international media echo (IME) functions. The book is based on an empirical study of interactions between French, American, and Russian media. As Le puts it at the very beginning, its aim is “a linguistic analysis in search of context theory in the domain of CDA, and a media / international relations inquiry in search of a linguistic method of analysis” (xi).

The volume comprises six chapters and five appendices. Chap. 1, “Media, international relations, collective memories, and CDA,” offers theoretical preliminaries related to IME, introduces an interacting cascading model based on Entman's work, and provides a brief presentation of IME in light of empirical study. As its title suggests, chap. 2, “National and international contexts for the IME,” describes contexts in which interactions between American, French, and Russian media occurred. Focusing on the textual part, chap. 3, “Russia in Le Monde and The New York Times,” performs a linguistic analysis of the content of editorials in French and American newspapers. Chap. 4, “Le Monde's and The New York Times' editorials in their national contexts,” is the ideational part that highlights the significance of editorials in their respective societies.. Demonstrating how the Western media discourse was received in Russian newspapers, chap. 5, “Russian reactions to the West,” examines responses of Russian newspapers to the Western media discourse on Russia in a given period. The closing chapter, chap. 6, “Crossing cultural and disciplinary boundaries,” shows how an analysis of the interplay among the textual, ideational, and interpersonal discloses the influence of IME between France, the United States, and Russia on international political relations. The appendices present the editorials under analysis, a chronology of Russian and world events (August 1999–July 2001), linguistic methodology, various aspects of coherence analysis, content coding, and a list of sentences related to a negative representation of Russia.

This volume makes a remarkable contribution in several ways: As the first book on the IME phenomenon, it conceptualizes its interdisciplinary framework within CDA, comprising media studies, international relations theories, and Social Identity theory; it presents an exhaustive theoretical exploration of the IME phenomenon in media discourses in different contexts; and, finally, it opens up new possibilities for intercultural and interdiscursive comparisons according to the representation of the Other. It convincingly demonstrates that “anti-Other rhetoric” is dangerous because it can spiral into distrust, dislike, or hate “that exacerbates difficulties and helps them to escalate into a conflict that is more than just discursive” (162–63). In addition to containing well-structured arguments, this book is delightfully written, and it will be of interest not only to linguists but also to a wide range of students and scholars in social sciences and humanities.

Editor's Note: Readers of this journal will be saddened to learn of Professor Čarapić's death in 2007. BJ