Language on Display: Writers, Fiction and Linguistic Culture in Post-Soviet Russia

ISBN-13: 9781474421560 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 232 str.

Ingunn Lunde

Opis

Post-Soviet Russia was a period of linguistic liberalisation, instability and change with varied attempts to regulate and legislate language usage, a time when the language question permeated all spheres of social, cultural and political life.

Key topics for debate included the Soviet linguistic legacy, the past and future of Russian, linguistic variation, language policy and linguistic ideologies. This book looks at how these debates featured in literature and illustrates the discussion through six interpretive readings of post-Soviet Russian prose. It analyses both the writers' explicit and implicit responses and in doing opens up new perspectives for sociolinguistic research on metalanguage.

Spanning a number of theoretical fields including language variation, language policy and literary stylistics, Ingunn Lunde provides a coherent way of triangulating these fields by the introduction of the concept of performative metalanguage. The book also offers insight into the role of writers in the broader social and political context of language culture in contemporary Russia and into the various ways in which the linguistic and aesthetic practices of literary art can engage in questions related to the negotiation of linguistic norms.

Spis treści

Acknowledgements

Note on transliteration and translations

Introduction: sociolinguistic change and the response of literature

Part I. Post-Soviet language culture

Chapter 1. Newspeak, counterspeak and linguistic memory

Chapter 2. Challenging the standard

Part II. Language, writers and fiction

Chapter 3. Languages and styles of post-Soviet Russian prose

Chapter 4. The literary norm

Part III. Writers on language: telling and showing

Chapter 5. Pisateli o iazyke: writers’ reflections on language

Chapter 6. Abanamat: reactions to the ban on profanity in art (2014)

Part IV. Language on display

Chapter 7. Confronting linguistic legacies: Evgenii Popov and Vladimir Sorokin

Chapter 8. Language, time and linguistic dystopia: Tatiana Tolstaia and Evgenii Vodolazkin

Chapter 9. Language ideologies and society: Valerii Votrin and Mikhail Gigolashvili

Conclusion: Towards a theory of performative metalanguage

References

Index