Esther Sampson

I am a Master’s student in the York/Ryerson joint program of Communication and Culture. I completed my HBIS (Interdisciplinary Studies) at Seneca College. My research thesis examines a specific collection of intercultural book covers to address issues of postcolonialism, cultural identity, representation, and ideology, drawing on Social Semiotics/Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA), cultural studies, and Gérard Genette’s work on Paratexts. More specifically, my thesis applies MDA and du Gay et al.’s cultural circuits, to the analysis of the covers of culturally Western, English translations of the Japanese self-help book, The Courage to be Disliked, by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. My thesis focuses on the ideologies and representations that are conveyed thorough the covers of the books, with special interest in the potential for pernicious ideologies and representations to be perpetuated, as emphasized by the books statuses as translated books.