Hello A-Level English students and welcome to this video from Excel at English focused on the Paris Anthology for AQA Language and Literature where we attempt to look at a text in under five minutes. This particular text that we will be looking at in this video is the Eurostar text, the very first, Stories are Waiting in Paris. This is a short and quite accessible text that we should be able to deal with in less than five minutes.
In summary, the Eurostar trains, they run from Paris. to London and backwards through the Channel Tunnel. And this text is an advert for the UK market, which encourages people to hop on the train to Paris, where these limitless possibilities await them. In terms of the context of this text, it is multimodal. It combines narration, still and live images, sound, music and logos.
And because this is an advert for visual media, there is a lot going on in it. Its purpose primarily is to persuade. It's a sales text which is promoting Eurostar and trying to entice UK travellers to travel to Paris.
But it's also entertaining and we know that adverts also seek to entertain us whether we're interested in the product or not. The audience for this text, the representations of audience are as upwardly mobile, young professionals, middle classes, educated with cosmopolitan tastes, people perhaps with quite a lot of spare income to go on little weekend breaks away. quirky, single and adventurous young people like me. Subjects in the video are things such as shopping, culture, food, locations and romance and you will know that other representations of those subjects are present in the anthology. So that moves us on to representations.
The text represents Paris as an exciting and varied location. It presents a combination of traditional and modern aspects of the city. It also acknowledges those stereotypical Parisian themes, the eating snails, the miserable locals, and romantic encounters.
And it does those in quite an ironic way, adding a touch of perhaps humour to the text. The pace of the text, as a lot of adverts are fast-paced, but the pace in this text perhaps suggests the vibrancy, the bustle, the busyness of the city. The text also represents its intended audience, as we discussed, as a carefree, open-minded socialites who are adventurous and open to new experiences. The text also represents itself.
Obviously, this text has a corporate author, Eurostar, rather than an individual. And it represents itself, Eurostar, as being a highly convenient way of accessing Paris. In terms of the linguistic features in this text, the second person perspective is used throughout to address the audience and to in some way situate them in the action and the repetition of this perspective, grammatical perspective, is reinforcing that sense of their involvement in the action.
This also connects with the point of view visual features to give this kind of immersive first person effect, if you like. of being in Paris so that we can imagine ourselves actually being there. The text uses epistemic modality, that modality linked to senses of possibility. And that modality is achieved through the repeated adverb maybe, which is foregrounded at the front of these constructions.
And the future tense, which is created by modal verbs will and won't. The text also uses dexis. Spatial dexis, this and that, creating a sense of place. And again, the dexis here connects the spoken and visual aspects of the text.
So it's a key feature in the multi-modality of this text. The pronouns replace all nouns and proper nouns in the text. These are supplied mostly by the images.
And this conveys the immediacy and the directness of your experience should you choose to go to Paris. Finally then, the connections. As a tourist destination, how does this represent Paris?
Well, there are other touristic representations of Paris, some more or less favourable, such as Bill Bryson's humorous account, or Around the World in 80 Dates, which is similarly a text with some romantic undertones. There are also other contrasting modes, such as the guidebooks, Paris for Children or Not for Parents Paris. or spoken representations of trips to Paris, such as the conversational texts visiting Paris. I hope that's been useful to you. That was Paris Eurostar in just under five minutes.
Good luck with your studies.