Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
Publication Online Conflict Discourse, Identity, and the Social Imagination of Silesian Minority in Poland(University of Kansas, 2020-05-31) Borowski, Krzysztof; Greenberg, Marc L.; Perelmutter, Renee; Vassileva-Karagyozova, Svetlana; Dwyer, Arienne; Wood, NathanThis dissertation shows how online discourse drives social change, boundary work, identity performance, and, ultimately, community management (including in-group/out-group membership) by looking at the development and spread of popular nationalism on the internet. As people from outside of the political elites form online communities, they become politically active in online discussions on national (and regional) identity. In doing so, such online communities become communities of practice (Eckert 2006) that discuss recent events and larger issues, take sides, form coalitions, come up with idiosyncratic ways of discussing certain topics and people, and, finally, engage in a range of online behaviors that involve othering, narrativizing, and hateful speech. As a result, nationalism becomes a catalyst for the formation of online communities that emerge and coalesce around political goals, common language, and shared ideological stances. The dissertation examines how public discourse drives social change by looking at nonelite political actors become the ‘movers and shakers’ who radicalize themselves over the course of ongoing online discussions and then advance their ideological agendas by inciting radicalization among others. Finally, this work also analyzes the key role of language in the process of political radicalization in online spaces. The dissertation traces the emergence, coalescence, and maintenance of two such factions in the Western Daily discussion forum (Pol. Dziennik Zachodni, https://dziennikzachodni.pl), as evidenced in language use. Taking a sociolinguistic approach to internet discussions and applying a close, critical discursive reading of unstructured online conversations, the dissertation examines such phenomena as linguistic creativity, othering, narrativizing, and hate speech. All of these phenomena are crucial for identity struggles because it is through them that identities are constructed in the Western Daily forum. Given the context collapse (Marwick and boyd 2011), it is through language that members of the two warring communities can instantaneously identify each other as language becomes an immediate identifier of each participant’s stance toward the topic of the discussion. Not only language conveys intended meanings, but it also encodes pre-existing assumptions that people bring to the conversation, which is why methods of critical discourse analysis are well-positioned to uncover these meanings by focusing on language use.Publication Color, Line, and Narrative: Visual Art Techniques in Lev Tolstoy’s Fiction(University of Kansas, 2019-05-31) Luttrell, Megan Hilliard; Kokobobo, Ani; Chernetsky, Vitaly; Vassileva-Karagyozova, Svetlana; Pultz, John; Wallo, OleksandraThis dissertation investigates Tolstoy’s anxiety over the written word and its ability to communicate truth to the reader. I examine how Tolstoy compensates for the shortcomings of language by borrowing techniques from painting, sculpture, and drawing, and how the visual nature of his work shifts in connection with his philosophy. I identify two visual extremes in Tolstoy’s art and thought, the juxtaposition of which sets up two ends of a spectrum upon which I measure the aesthetic gradations of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Confession, and The Death of Ivan Ilych. I call Tolstoy’s earlier aesthetic “painterly” in nature, drawing from the numerous qualities of spatial literature it contains as well as its inclusion of a rich color palette and various ekphrastic passages. I begin my discussion of this “painterly” aesthetic in an examination of the 1857 short story “Lucerne.” I then trace the shifts in Tolstoy’s visuality toward what I term his “draughtsmanly” aesthetic. This later visuality, which culminates in the 1899 novel Resurrection, features many aspects of temporal literature, such as increased reliance on plot progression, as well as a black-and-white color scheme and increased use of contrasts that give the work a sculptural feel. My project is the first in the field to explore visual art techniques in Tolstoy, and reevaluates the author’s later works that are often dismissed as aesthetically inferior to his earlier writing. I note how the changes in Tolstoy’s visual aesthetic relate to shifts in his moral and philosophical worldview, which changes from one open to questions and change, to an unshakeable and uniquely Tolstoyan understanding of life and the best way to live it. I argue that neither aesthetic is superior to the other and that both are equally representative of Tolstoy’s own personal reality at the time of each work’s creation.Publication Diagnosing the Demonic: Reading Valerii Briusov’s Fiery Angel as Pathography(University of Kansas, 2016-12-31) Knickmeier Cummings, Kelly; Carlson, Maria; Chernetsky, Vitaly; Greenberg, Marc; Kokobobo, Ani; Levin, EveRussian Symbolists struggled to write a counter-narrative to the prevailing master narrative of disintegration, degeneration, and social pathology advanced by the emerging fields of social science, psychology, and modern medicine at the turn of the twentieth century. The Symbolists invested their counter-narrative of transformation in the medieval alchemical promise of restored wholeness and transcendence of the material—even as the modern world rushed toward materialism. They attempted to realize their narrative through the process of poetic zhiznetvorchestvo, or life creation. This dissertation examines one attempt to “practice” zhiznetvorchestvo by tracing Symbolist Valerii Briusov’s (1873–1924) experiment in life creation with the minor writer Nina Petrovskaia (1879–1928), which he captured in his major novel, Fiery Angel (1907–1908). In Fiery Angel, Briusov poeticized Petrovskaia as “Renata,” the unhappy and tortured psychopomp to Briusov’s own alter-ego, the rational Ruprecht. Setting the work in the sixteenth century, a period of change and confusion eerily echoed by the Silver Age, Briusov diagnosed his and Petrovskaia’s quest for mystical experience as an encounter with demonomania, a medieval condition indicative of demonic possession that afflicted witch and saint alike and whose signs and symptoms corresponded to hysteria as defined by the fin de siècle. Briusov’s novel chronicles Renata’s descent into illness, her suffering, and her eventual death by fusing autobiographical details with historical data and clearly-defined medical symptoms. Briusov’s novel thus functions as a pathography—an extended account of an illness, individual or social, and the dysfunctionalities it introduces into the world of the sufferer and the people close to him or her. As a specific genre, pathography attempts to describe the illness, to find a way to come to terms with it, and to deal with its inevitable consequences. This genre offered Briusov an opportunity to diagnose and explore the relationship that existed among himself, Petrovskaia, and Andrei Belyi (1880–1934; the Count Heinrich of the novel). It also allowed him to explore the dysfunctionalities of the Russian Symbolist milieu and to diagnose the fin de siècle as “mad”—in a particular way. The dissertation explores the master narrative of the fin de siècle and the Symbolist counter-narrative, investigates the concept of life creation, describes the genre of pathography and its distinctive features, and examines Briusov’s Fiery Angel in this context.Publication Terror and Transcendence in the Void: Viktor Pelevin’s Philosophy of Emptiness(University of Kansas, 2017-12-31) Stakun, Rebecca; Chernetsky, Vitaly; Carlson, Maria; Greenberg, Marc L.; Kokobobo, Ani; Hayes, BruceThis dissertation explores the Russian experience of the “void” left in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union as it is reflected in Viktor Pelevin’s Chapaev and Pustota (1996), Generation “P” (1999), The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (2004), and Empire “V” (2006). If, as postmodernist theory suggests, there can be no overarching cultural (or other) narratives, then in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse post-Soviet Russia found itself in a void, with no old, established national narrative and no new “Russian idea” to shape future identity. At the very moment when post-Soviet Russians found their identities in greatest flux, communication and the search for identity were complicated by a global “crisis of signification” in which words lost their power to convey meaning about one’s reality. On the semiotic level, postmodernism posited the breakdown of the binary sign (signifier and signified), severing word from meaning and creating “empty signifiers.” The crisis was intensified by the twin realizations that the pervasive symbols of the Soviet regime had become “empty” and meaningless, while the western capitalism and hyperconsumerism that replaced them were equally empty and meaningless. All that was real was the void between signifier and signified. Many contemporary Russian writers engaged the void in their work, seeing it as a negative concept. Pelevin’s novels are unique in their treatment of the void as simultaneously positive and negative, as both emptiness and potentiality. The void (emptiness), as symbol and as philosophical concept, becomes prominent in times of great change that challenge national and individual identities. Historically, the void has played a prominent role in Russian philosophy and literature. It does so again in the post-Soviet period. Pelevin uses the East-West binary to explore Russia’s post-collapse void. East and West are the two most important cultural identities with which Russia has historically engaged. Pelevin explores Western values (specifically capitalism and hyperconsumerism) in Generation “P” and Empire “V” and portrays them more negatively. This “negative void” is the emptiness that underlies not only the symbols and language of the now defunct Soviet system, but also the advertisements and language of imported Western models. Both turned out to be simulacra—images with no meaning in reality, a mask over the void. Eastern values predominate in Chapaev and Pustota and The Sacred Book of the Werewolf; Pelevin portrays them more positively. Engaging with Mahāyāna Buddhism, Pelevin seeks to resolve the problems of hypermaterialism, empty signifiers, and pervasive simulacra that plague the West. In Buddhism both signifiers and signifieds are illusory, making the problem of the breakdown of the binary sign moot. Pelevin suggests that emptiness, or the void, offers a possible escape from the conundrum that faces the West by transcending its materialism and its ills. While Pelevin personally favors the eastern Buddhist model of self that embraces the void, he does not recommend that Russia imitate the East, as this would amount to little more than a reversal of Peter the Great’s westernization (and another iteration of Lotman and Uspenskii’s binary cultural model). Pelevin ultimately fails to suggest a new model for Russian national identity in these four novels. The author may still be looking for such a model or, perhaps, the “nothingness” that his search has yielded is his answer.Publication Rethinking Reflexivity: SJA/SE-verbs in Russian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian(University of Kansas, 2015-05-31) Moulton, Erin Elizabeth; Dickey, Stephen M; Greenberg, Marc L; Perelmutter, Renee; Comer, William; Dwyer, ArienneThis dissertation is a comparative study of the class of verbs commonly termed “reflexive” in Russian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS). These verbs occur with the affix -sja in Russian and with the clitic se in BCS. Despite the fact that they are commonly called reflexive, they do not necessarily refer to reflexive events in which the same entity is both agent and patient.. The analysis has an emphasis on semantics and uses Cognitive Grammar as a framework to determine the semantic prototypes for this group of verbs in each language. It uses as a starting point Suzanne Kemmer’s (1993) monograph on middle voice, which shows that Russian is a middle-marking language in which the light form -sja denotes middle voice and the heavy form sebja denotes true reflexivity. The study hypothesizes that Kemmer’s analysis is accurate for Russian, but not for some other Slavic languages, namely BCS. Quantitative and qualitative analysis shows that in Russian the semantic prototype for verbs with -sja is MIDDLE, while in BCS the prototype for verbs with se is REFLEXIVE. The study defines semantic types for this group of verbs including REFLEXIVE, POSSESSIVE REFLEXIVE, RECIPROCAL, IMPERSONAL, PASSIVE, MIDDLE and BENEFACTIVE and sets up diagnostic tests for determining REFLEXIVE, POSSESSIVE REFLEXIVE, and RECIPROCAL events. Quantitative analysis is based on data collected from the Parasol parallel corpus from three parallel texts and shows that both languages have MIDDLE as the most frequent semantic type for SE-verbs for both languages, but also that that Russian sometimes uses a heavy form for REFLEXIVE, POSSESSIVE REFLEXIVE, or RECIPROCAL semantic types where BCS has a light form SE-verb. Qualitative data shows that BCS SE-verbs occur in various situations unique to BCS and not in Russian, including across-the-board dependencies, past passive participles formed from SE-verbs, and se modified by adjectives as a noun or pronoun would be modified. The combined quantitative and qualitative analysis shows that BCS SE-verbs maintain the syntactic structure of REFLEXIVE verbs, pointing to the conclusion that the prototype for BCS SE-verbs is REFLEXIVE, while the prototype for these verbs in Russian is MIDDLE.Publication Resurrection: The History and Reconstitution of the Eurasian Idea(University of Kansas, 2002-05-14) Schmidt, Matthew J.The paper looks at the historical basis for the belief that Russian values are neither eastern nor western, but something in between - Eurasian. It traces the philosophical roots of the Eurasian idea and lays out how Russian nationalism in the post-Soviet era is built on this same foundation. Finally, it argues that Russian foreign policy cannot be fully understood except in the context of the Eurasian ideology.Publication The Prefix PO- and Aspect in Russian and Polish: A Cognitive Grammar Account(University of Kansas, 2011-12-31) Christensen, Jason Heath; Dickey, Stephen M; Greenberg, Marc L; Perelmutter, Renee; Vyatkina, Nina; Łaziński, MarekThis study examines the meanings of the prefix po- and verbal aspect in Russian and Polish in a Cognitive Grammar framework. The principles of Cognitive Grammar adopted in this study are based on Langacker (1991). This study follows Dickey's (2000) East-West division of aspect, within which the prototypical meanings of the Russian perfective and imperfective aspects are temporal definiteness and qualitative temporal indefiniteness, respectively, and the prototypical meanings of the Polish perfective and imperfective aspects are temporal definiteness/totality and quantitative temporal indefiniteness. According to Cognitive Grammar, the prototype is the most salient node in a network; this study is based around an analysis of the meaning and grammatical function of the Russian delimitative in po- and the Polish distributive in po- as prototypes in their respective semantic networks for po-. Regarding the methodological approach of this dissertation, in addition to relying on the views presented in the traditional literature, quantitative data is also presented, consisting of dictionary counts and hit counts and relative frequencies drawn from online corpora in support of the view that the delimitative is the prototype verb in po- in Russian and the distributive is the prototype verb in po- in Polish. The results of the corpus-based research show that the productivity and level of use are higher for the prototype Russian delimitative in po- relative to the Polish delimitative in po-and for the prototype Polish distributive in po- relative to the Russian distributive in po-. The main conclusion arrived upon in this study is that the meanings of the prototype verb in po- and the prototypical perfective meaning in each language overlap, which is manifested as the ability of the prototype verb in po- to function as a perfective partner in the grammar.Publication Textual Dimensions of Urban Space in M.A. Bulgakov's Master and Margarita(University of Kansas, 2011-04-26) Dement, Sidney Eric; Carlson, Maria; Clowes, Edith W.; Comer, William J.; Dickey, Stephen M.; Marx, LeonieThis dissertation explores the relationship between urban space and urban text according to the principles outlined by the Moscow-Tartu School of Semiotics in the 1980s and 90s. While the Petersburg Text in V.N. Toporov's formulation has become a commonplace of Russian literary criticism, a typologically equivalent "Moscow Text" has repeatedly been dismissed. This study outlines the common arguments for dismissing a "Moscow Text," suggests counter arguments, and proposes a model for analyzing Moscow space as a text in literary texts. The model is then used to prove the thesis that Moscow space functions as a text in M.A. Bulgakov's Master and Margarita. Three prominent loci within the Moscow of Master and Margarita demonstrate the textuality of urban space in literary texts: the monument to Pushkin on Tverskoi Boulevard, Margarita's Mansion, and the Spring Ball of the Full Moon. Bulgakov cites the historical realia and the literary texts associated with Moscow's monument to Pushkin to develop the theme of the poet in the novel. The semiotic principle of "labyrinthine Moscow" (moskovskaia putanitsa) enables Bulgakov to build the mysterious and ambivalent mansion (osobniak) that plays a central role in the paths of Margarita and Ivan throughout the novel. Turn-of-the-century photographs from the Sandunov Bathhouses uncover an additional layer of Moscow imagery at the Spring Ball of the Full Moon that reinforces plot connections between the Moscow, Iershalaim, and Phantasmagorical settings in the novel. Analyses of these loci demonstrate Bulgakov's uses of the textual dimensions of Moscow space to represent the struggle between the humanist and those in power (vlast') and contemplate the limits of artistic and personal freedom (volia).Publication On the Paths of the Soul: Stanisław Przybyszewski and the Russian Stage. The Cases of Vera Komissarzhevskaia and Vsevolod Meierkhol'd (1900-1910)(University of Kansas, 2008-01-01) Johnson, Michael Duane; Clowes, Edith W; Staniunas, John; Vassileva-Karagyozova, Svetlana; Wood, Nathaniel D; Comer, William JThis dissertation inquires into the impact of the controversial Polish dramatist, essayist, and novelist Stanisław Przybyszewski on the theatrical innovations of two great Russian actor-directors of the early 20th century, Vera Komissarzhevskaia and Vsevolod Meierkhol'd. An erudite and prolific writer almost forgotten today, Przybyszewski has long been regarded as a major figure of Młoda Polska. His unique synthesis of metaphysics, occultism, eroticism, and aestheticism created great controversy in the fin-de-siècle Russian Empire, as the changing Russian theatrical landscape moved from realism and naturalism to less representational forms. My argument for a significant reception in the Russian theater rests on Przybyszewski's aesthetic theories, and particularly, his concept of the "path of the soul." I propose that this concept acted as a catalyst for change in the artistic and professional development of both Russian theatre figures. This dissertation is divided into three sections. The first section, Chapter I, provides a background on the state of Russian theatre at the end of the 19th century and reviews the early reception of Przybyszewski in the Russian press. The second section, Chapters II-IV, examines Komissarzhevskaia's reception of Przybyszewski within a historical-descriptive framework. After examining the possible origins of her affinity for Przybyszewski, Chapter II offers an analysis of textual parallels between Komissarzhevskaia's correspondence and a Russian translation of On the Paths of the Soul (1900). Chapter III draws on Austro-Romanian psychiatrist Jacob L. Moreno's theory of the "psychodrama" to speculate as to why Kommissarzhevskaia was drawn to Przybyszewski's dramas. It explores the hypothesis that Komissarzhevskaia experienced catharsis as she performed her psychologically demanding Przybyszewski roles. Chapter IV examines thematic parallels between Przybyszewski's 1902 theoretical essay On Drama and the Stage and comments that Komissarzhevskaia made in defense of her production of Przybyszewski's drama, Life's Banquet, in 1909. The third section, Chapters V and VI, examines Przybyszewski's reception in Meierkhol'd's writings and productions during his formative years as a member of the Association of New Drama (Tovarishchestvo Novoi Dramy). Chapter V sets forth the possible reasons for Meierkhol'd's affinity for Przybyszewski. Chapter VI argues that Przybyszewski's "path of the soul," with its focus on the soul as a reflection of the eternal, prescribed particular methods, such as synthesis and symbolization, which Meierkhol'd used to break from the confining traditions of naturalism. Chapter VI argues that Meierkhol'd's 1903 production of Snow represents one of his earliest experiments with non-representational (uslovnyi) forms. In support of this claim, this chapter provides an interpretive analysis of two articles by Aleksei Remizov and the production's combination of music, drama, and lighting.Publication The Myth of the Woman Warrior and World War II in Soviet Culture(University of Kansas, 2008-07-29) Harris, Adrienne; Clowes, Edith W; Carlson, Maria; Comer, William J; Cudd, Ann E; Levin, Eve"The Myth of the Woman Warrior and World War II in Soviet Culture" defines, analyzes, and explains the figure of the Soviet "woman warrior" who participated in World War II, asking the questions: what is the nature of the woman warrior in works about World War II and what does her portrayal tell us about Soviet culture and memory? Although the woman warrior has deep roots in Russian culture, this topic has received almost no attention from a cultural perspective. After a discussion of the 1930s militarization, this study turns to works depicting women who participated in WWII and argues that these depictions fall into three types based on deep archetypes: the martyr, handmaiden, and the "polianitsa," or knight. This dissertation elucidates essentialist and constructivist intersections by investigating why certain images of women motivated Soviet citizens during the war and then became powerful myths that shaped national consciousness.