Cultural Texts Research Articles

АВТЕНТИЧНИЙ ПОЕТИЧНИЙ ТЕКСТ ЯК ОБ’ЄКТ КУЛЬТУРИ ТА ІНШОМОВНОЇ ЛІНГВОДИДАКТИКИ

Authentic poetic text as an object of foreign linguistic didactics is investigated in the article. Formation of linguo-socio-cultural competence as a constituent part of communicative competence of a philology student from the point of view of culture text study is analyzed. Attention is focused on the fact that “informative condensation” and “hyper-semanticism” as well as conceptuality, emotionality, imagery, rhythm and euphony cause inexhaustible esthetic, cognitive, communicative, personally-valuable, mnemonic, educational and training opportunities of authentic poetic text. The main object of poetry – depiction of a person; his inner world, his thoughts about the surrounding world and life in it, his attitude to other people, the nature and society; emotions, feelings and unrest of human’s soul. Depicting events and phenomena of everyday life of a person, raising his psychological, ethical, esthetical, ideological, philosophical, spiritual and other issues, expressing attitude to them of a poet as a thinker and humanist, poetry in such a way, firstly, demonstrates solution of these issues, and secondly, performs its cognitive-informational function. Is serves to enrich socio-cultural experience of a person, his spiritual, moral and intellectual improvement. Communicative, axiological, cognitive, informational, culture-bearing, meaningful functions of poetic text are characterized. Efficiency of application of foreign literature and poetry masterpieces while forming foreign communicative competence in philology students at the advanced level of study is proved.

Семантический фрейм как элемент смыслообразования

Introduction. In the modern socio-cultural space, the concept of the meaning of the text of culture, the process of meaning-making have become relevant among scientists. Previously, these concepts were considered in linguistics, psychology and philosophy, today they have become popular among cultural scientists, and art historians. A theoretical analysis of the concept of “frame” allows us to conclude that a frame is a fragment of a person’s memory, representing knowledge about a particular cultural phenomenon. Consideration of the frame in the structure of meaning-making allowed us to reveal that the frame is a cognitive component of the meaning-forming structure. The semantic frame is associated with the concept of understanding the text of culture, which we designate as an artifact, a semantic model of consciousness. In the presence of semantic experience, it is possible to understand the text of culture. We associate the frame with the practical activity of a person and society, that is, with the meaning given to him in the experience of cultural activity. Conclusion. A semantic frame is an element of meaning-making, since it carries knowledge about a particular cultural phenomenon and allows us to establish the meaning of a given cultural text, its axiological meaning. A frame is a generalized frame of experience, a scheme of practical action in which images are revealed through functions. The truth of the frame is established in practice, since a person is a practical and expedient being.

Emotive Characteristics of Lacunae in Russian and Turkish Languages

All that a recipient notices but doesn’t understand in the text of foreign culture, which seems to him strange and requires interpretation, indicates that the text contains national-specific elements of the culture in which the text is created, notably lacuna. Every person perceives the surrounding reality in his own way. Words are connected to the absence of things and events in Russian or Turkish languages. Different nations cannot think using similar notions. For normal communication, it is necessary to be well informed about the national culture and customs of the nation and the nation speaking the given language.Keywords: Communication, foreign culture, the lacuna, worldview of the nation.

Unpacking the Complexity of Gurān Identity

Abstract This study aims to explore the complexity of the term Gurān and how its meaning has evolved over time. The research poses several research questions, including the historical and cultural context of the term, different perspectives on whether Gurān people should be considered a distinct ethnic group or part of the larger Kurdish population, and the role of the term in shaping social, cultural, and political dynamics among different social groups. Additionally, the study seeks to explore the perceptions and experiences of Gurān people regarding the use of the term and their understanding of their own identity. Through a methodical analysis of historical and cultural texts, interviews, as well as contemporary discussions in social media, this research demonstrates a method for studying complex topics such as the Gurān identity and provides insight into the complexities of endonyms and exonyms and their relation to broader issues of identity and conflict.

“The Thunder Rolls and the Lightning Strikes”: Pathetic Fallacy as a Multimodal Metaphor

Pathetic fallacy (hereafter PF) has received varied definitions by educators, scholars, and literary critics. Pager-McClymont created a model of PF based on a survey of English teachers, using a checklist of stylistic tools and foregrounding theory. The model views PF as a specific type of conceptual metaphor: a master metaphor, and defines it as a projection of emotions from an animated entity onto the surroundings. Three indicators of PF were identified: imagery, repetition, and negation. Furthermore, multiple effects of PF were observed, such as conveying suspense through surroundings, particularly thunder and lightning. In this paper, I explore if Pager-McClymont’s model of PF can be applied to texts from popular culture, such as the television show RuPaul’s Drag Race, the film Clue, and the song “The Thunder Rolls”. The analysis employs McIntyre’s multimodal stylistic methodology to the texts’ transcripts and focuses on the multimodal presentation of PF’s criteria and indicators. Findings show that PF’s effects are present in popular culture texts and contribute to enriching suspense, thus making Pager-McClymont’s model of PF applicable to everyday entertainment.

METHODOLOGY OF TEACHING EMOTIONALLY COLORED METAPHORS IN SONG DISCOURSE

In cultural and linguistic analysis, a modern song text is considered as an integral verbal and musical set, which is an element of modern (verbal and musical) culture and includes a verbal (linguistic) component. As linguoculturologists note, “culture generally exists in the form of texts - iconic works of human spiritual activity.”A person joins a culture in the process of appropriating “foreign” texts that make up this culture. However, it is necessary to note the fact that a text is a cultural object only to the extent that “our relationship with it reproduces or for the first time gives rise to human possibilities in us ... seeing and understanding something in the world and in ourselves. “It is culture that is the “second nature” of a person and therefore acts as a kind of global socio-regulatory mechanism for adapting a person and society to the conditions of the natural and social environment.A person thinks and is aware of the society at the moment when he thinks and realizes the world around him with cultural texts (in particular, modern song lyrics), thereby turning to other representatives of culture, satisfying the requirements of cultural communication. According to culturologists, there are two social forms of culture: mass culture and elite. The song text is a cultural product and is part of mass culture.It is assumed that mass culture is consumed by all people, regardless of place and country of residence. It is the culture of everyday life, presented to the widest audience through various channels, including the media and communications.The song text is a complex cultural text, embodied at the verbal-melodic, behavioral and mental level. These levels are interconnected, they are mutually determined and complement each other, which is very important for linguoecology. In the study of the linguistic component of the song text, we turn to the environment that forms, explains and complements the content of the verbal component (musical component, extralinguistic factors of mass culture).

Artificial Flesh: Rights and New Technologies of the Human in Contemporary Cultural Texts

My essay explores challenges posed to the discourse of rights from new technologies of the human as these are represented in a range of cultural texts—Spike Jonze’s film her, Marie Kondo’s The Magic of Tidying Up, Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. These works share a concern with the implications of a relationship, a shared or co-produced world, in which both humans and nonhumans have agency. I conclude by revisiting the bifurcated discourses of antihumanism, especially through a brief consideration of an Afropessimist critique of the category of “Man”, to ask: What status, affordances, and rights, should be extended to nonhumans: robots, anthropomorphized commodities, humanoids, AIs, or human adjacents, or to those excluded or abjected from the category of “the fully human”?

МӘТІН АРҚЫЛЫ БІЛІМАЛУШЫЛАРДЫҢ МӘДЕНИТАНЫМДЫҚ ҚҰЗЫРЕТТІЛІГІН ҚАЛЫПТАСТЫРУ

At present, the education system has reached a new level. The modern education system has also set a goal. This is the preparation of a free- thinking person who has his own thoughts, who has mastered all the competencies, is competent, brought up according to psychological principles, and has a broad worldview. Recently, the concept of "cultural competence" is often used in the education system in order to expand the worldview of students and develop the horizons of knowledge. A mature person with cultural competence is always in demand. In the learning process, attention should be paid to the perception, attention, cognition and understanding of the student. Teaching a child through cultural texts is very important. The article proves that the cultural competence of students is formed through the text. The article deals with the psychological foundations of increasing the cultural competence of students through the text.

The intertextuality of visual and verbal works by naive artist Nadezhda Spirina

In modern humanities, it is customary to consider naive art and naive literature as two separate phenomena. Based on this approach, the study of naive fine art is given over to art criticism, and the study of naive literature remains within the framework of philology and linguistics. Culturology explores culture as the historical and social experience of people, which can manifest itself in their work and is interpreted in the "cultural texts" of art. This article actualizes the need to move from narrowly focused research to a comprehensive approach: contextual study of visual and verbal works of naive artists. The objects of this study are paintings and poems by the naive artist Nadezhda Spirina (Ivanovo region, the city of Yuzha). The subject of the research is the aesthetics and poetics of the intertextuality of the works of a naive artist. The aim of the work is to analyze the stylistics and composition of paintings in combination with the poetic texts of the author. Tasks – search for intertextual references and reminiscences in the works of N. Spirina, the disclosure in her works of various practices of the author's self-reflection, testing the hypothesis of expanding the status of the work of a naive artist as a cultural text, taking into account the semantic features of verbal utterance for the perception and reading of the visual text, that is, the intertextuality of works of naive art. Synchronistic, comparative, biographical, psychological, semiotic, cultural and historical analysis are used. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the analysis of the stylistics and composition of the paintings of a naive artist in combination with the poetic texts of the author, which makes it possible to more accurately interpret the artist's mission, which forms his naive utterance.

Racial impersonation: Others in Finnish visual culture

The article sketches an overview of the impersonation of Black and Sámi Others in Finnish cinema and visual culture. How and why have Finnish cultural producers used blackface performance or ‘fake’ Sámi garments in their films? By connecting several historically and aesthetically disparate texts, the article makes evident an underpinning structure of racial Othering. The structure is obscured, however, by commentators who argue such Other performance is innocent and not intended to ridicule or harm. This defence maintains that it is White Finns’s power to define what counts as racism. By combining analysis of disparate examples of racial impersonation in cinema and cultural texts with critiques and defences of it, the article traces how structural racism is maintained. Study of cinema history contributes to understanding the history of structural racism.

The notorious RBG: The discursive power of celebrity in defense of the supreme court

AbstractWhen speaking publicly outside the Court, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who garnered celebrity status due to her fiery dissents in the 2010s, did so to explain and defend the institution. Whereas celebrity is usually associated with personality cults, we argue that she used her podium to emphasize the importance of collegiality and process in the Supreme Court as an institution. By analyzing three cultural texts, the biopic On the Basis of Sex, the documentary RBG, and the autobiographical collection My Own Words, we show how Ginsburg brought popular culture and the Supreme Court into conversation with one another.

New Gloss to Urban Heritage: The Discursive Repackaging of Scottish Cities as Wellness Retreats in Online Tourism Promotion Texts 2019-20

The study, located at the intersection of Media, Tourism and Cultural Studies, is an analysis of the cultural identity of Scottish cities emerging from their on-line promotion as tourist destinations in the last pre-Covid-19 season 2019-20. It is argued that Scotland’s tangible and intangible urban heritage was consistently promoted as generating hedonistic, existential and spiritual experiences leading to an optimal state of individual well-being. The material under scrutiny involves official and independent tourism websites of six Scottish cities available on VisitScotland.com in 2019-20. Treated as cultural texts, they are analysed as evidence of the emergence of yet another commodified version of Scotland’s regional identity as a well-being paradise. The notion of place identity in the context of tourism is understood as a combination of selected physical attributes of a destination with a system of meanings and values attached to them by means of carefully planned discursive operations. Verbal discourse analysis is employed to demonstrate the prevalence of wellness discourse in the promotion of multifaceted urban heritage attractions. The term ‘palimpsest’ is proposed as a metaphoric description of the multi-layered place identities of the Scottish cities constructed in the texts under scrutiny. A concluding prediction is made that those identities constitute but a transient phase on the continuum of promotional efforts to adjust Scotland’s urban tourism offer to the changing consumer demand.

Eksplikaciya koncepta «holodnaya vojna» v videoigrovyh kibertekstah: osobennosti mediagrammatiki i ideologizaciya istorii

The article analyses historical video games whose narratives are confined to the “Cold War” thematic frame. Video games are treated as original cyber texts of modern screen culture which shape the current discourse of popular history. Emphasis is laid on both the ideological content of video game narratives and features of the media language in which they are publicly explicated.

A jubilee of fifty books known only by title

This article ends the special issue that aims to introduce the conception of “books known only by title” as a fruitful new focus of research. In this article, we include an annotated assortment of books known only by title. This collection of fifty such books is not exhaustive, but it may serve as an inspiration and a springboard for future researchers by demonstrating the breadth and rich diversity of this phenomenon. To aid such research, we have provided bibliographic information for each entry. We also discuss ways of categorizing these books and the challenges of those categorizations. The list is hardly exhaustive, but it is selective. Our examples center on the first millennium C.E., and they center on the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Certain entries may push at those boundaries but were included because of their special interest to us. Most notably, the classical texts of Greco-Roman culture were not included; nor were the canons of East Asia, or many other literary cultures across the globe.

“Nobody Can Be Vulgar All Alone”: The Power of Shame in Broadchurch

Abstract Through positing shame as inherent in women’s sexual development, this article explores the screen representations of sexually abused female survivors/victims by focusing especially on the articulation of their selfhood. It interrogates the representation of rape narratives in the television series Broadchurch (Amazon 2017) by focusing primarily on the visual culture and visual texts as social texts. Using an intersectional perspective informed by such disciplines as feminism, film and television studies, body politics, trauma studies, and psychology, it also intends to prepare women to be media critical and question the effects of the heavy penetration of popular culture into their lives. The notion of selfhood developed in this article emphasizes embodiment, agency, conscience, and the inextricable relationship between self and other. (AF)

Reading in the Haitian Revolution: Toussaint L'Ouverture and Classical Education in Harriet Martineau's The Hour and the Man

ABSTRACT: Harriet Martineau's historical novel, The Hour and the Man (1841), presents the intellectual development of Toussaint L'Ouverture through his reading of Western classical texts during the Haitian Revolution. By dramatizing Toussaint's reading and rereading, discussing and teaching of European classical and Christian texts at major turning points of the revolution, the novel highlights their liberating power in the contexts of slavery and emancipation. While the hero's close engagement with European textual culture has been criticized by both Victorian and post-colonial readers, this analysis argues that, far from repressing or betraying his people, Martineau's Toussaint interprets these texts with a free and independent mind that incorporates their original liberating power into the emancipation endeavor.

Art, artifice, and eroticized infantilization: Imagining Japanese femininities in the Weimar Republic in Fritz Lang's Harakiri (1919) and Kapitän Mertens's “Kio, die lasterhafte Kirschblüte” (1924)

AbstractThis article focuses on the ways in which a Japan‐specific Orientalism regarding Japanese femininities establishes itself in Weimar Germany's popular culture. In this period of German democratization in which we observe Weimar women's social, sexual, and political liberation, I propose that popular culture texts such as Fritz Lang's film Harakiri (1919) and Kapitän Mertens's magazine publication “Kio, die lasterhafte Kirschblüte” (1924) created an alternative fantasy engaging with contemporary anxieties and dreams. I read the depiction of Japanese femininities as a mediation of predominantly heterosexual male fears about the liberation movement of modern Weimar women as circulated in mass media. In developing this reading, I observe a simultaneity of three different imagined Japanese femininities: aestheticized artificialization/reification, eroticization, and infantilization. I argue that the narrative construction of such ultimately subservient exotic, doll‐like figures is diametrically opposed to the widely studied New Woman of Weimar and thus warrants further inquiry.

Specifics of Brand as Linguocultural Unit (Tula Text of Culture)

The semantic and pragmatic features of the brand as a linguocultural unit are described. The relevance of the study lies in the fact that considering the brand as a linguistic and cultural unit replenishes knowledge about the means that objectify the process of interaction between language and culture. It has been established that the assignment of this status to a language unit is possible when it is included in the system of everyday culture and has acquired one of its functions — self-presentation. The study of the properties of the brand was carried out on the material of the Tula subculture, in which about 20 such units were identified. In the course of the study, the brand is defined as a linguocultural sign that represents a subculture and participates in the process of its identification. Branding strategies for identifying the Tula culture are defined: appeal to specialties, samovar weapons, as well as precedent names. It has been established that the brand models culture, influences the peculiarities of its perception. It was revealed that the brand is characterized by such features as uniqueness, exclusivity, typicality, which distinguish it from a number of similar phenomena, ensure its expectation and understandability. It is proved that the semantics of the brand is characterized by concreteness, appraisal, emotiveness. It is concluded that brands represent the value dominants of culture: in Tula culture, they include craftsmanship, protection of the Fatherland, and the preservation of spiritual traditions.

The Reception of Greek Tragedies in Eugen O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night

A Long Day's Journey into Night occupies a prominent place in Eugene O'Neill's work because it is full of autobiographical elements. In addition to biographical episodes, the play is rich in literary parallels. generally speaking, O'Neill’s plays are heavily influenced by ancient Greek tragedies. The conflict/s between the main characters as well as protagonists’ struggle with their own selves and the mistakes of the past are the main point in this play. The myth of the son who fights against his father as embodied in the play is associated with the plot of  Sophocles’  Oedipus Rex. Sons see their own mistakes from their birth, but their every step against destiny is also a great tragedy. Euripides’ characters are also reinterpreted in this play. Medea and Meri suffer from the same misfortunes. Meri regrets her past decisions, mourns her lost child and considers herself destroyed as a woman. O Neill’s works are full of allusions to ancient Greek tragedies because modern literature is a kind of rereading and rearranging the great cultural artefacts and/or texts of the past.

Understanding transnational decontextualization-recontextualization through Shingeki no Kyojin: The perils and possibilities surrounding Japanese manga and anime

ABSTRACT Japanese anime has continued to gain recognition as one of the strongest cultural influences in a globalized world. We examine how the transnational process of decontextualization-recontextualization can shift the messages of popular culture texts as situated in differing collective memories. To highlight this process, we analyze Shingeki no Kyojin (known to English-speaking audiences as Attack on Titan). Shingeki no Kyojin provides insightful grounds for analysis given its tremendous popularity in both Japan and beyond, its message of resistance against U.S. militarism, and its recontextualized uptake by the American alt-right, even including an Arizona congressman. Our analysis reveals the importance of understanding popular culture alongside context and the impact of decontextualized-recontextualized transformations of meaning on transnational processes of collective memory discourse.