From Poets to Padonki: Linguistic Authority and Norm Negotiation in Modern Russian Culture

Norms are essential to the human condition. Whether in the guise of tradition, culture, canon or rules, norms are therefore central to studies in the humanities. This book focuses on Russian language culture of the post-revolutionary and post-Soviet periods, times when norms — linguistic and otherwise — have been eagerly debated, challenged, broken and redefined. Exploring the intersections between linguistic authority and creative response, an international team of scholars examines different realms of linguistic practice (literary fiction, internet slang, literary criticism and aesthetics, writers’ blogs, linguistic play) and various arenas for “talk about talk” (the classroom, blogs, the media, or the courtroom). By combining various approaches and disciplines — linguistics, literary criticism, new media studies — the book as a whole explores the multiplicity of meanings that are accorded to the notion of linguistic norms in the Russian community. The result is both a broad and a detailed picture of important trends in modern Russian language culture.

Contents

Ingunn Lunde & Martin Paulsen: Introduction (available for download on this page)

Henning Andersen: Living Norms

Martin Paulsen: Norm Negotiation in Russian Literary Criticism

Vera Zvereva: «Язык падонкаф»: Дискуссии пользователей Рунета

Elena Markasova: «Я не употребляю древние вводные слова…»: (о  судьбе вводных конструкций в русском языке последнего десятилетия)

Ellen Rutten: 'Wrong Is the New Right. Or Is It? Linguistic Identity in Russian Writers’ Weblogs

Ingunn Lunde: Performative Metalanguage: Negotiating Norms Through Verbal Action

Tine Roesen: The Old Man's New Language: Semantic Shifts and Linguistic Countermeasures in Aleksei Slapovskii's Oni

Dirk Uffelmann: The Compliance with and Imposition of Social and Linguistic Norms in Sorokin’s Norma and Den’ oprichnika

Karin Grelz: When Non-Negotiation is the Norm:  Sorokin’s Tridtsataia liubov’ Mariny and Tsvetaeva's Krysolov

Peter Alberg Jensen: «Мир, который cтал cам не cвой» в эстетике молодого Пастернака

Heinrich Kirschbaum: «Оползень Опояза»: Образ оползня в работах формалистов

Susanna Witt: Pasternak’s Iskazhenie and the Practice of Creative Evolution

Boris Norman: Сдвиг в значении, основанный на формальном сходстве слов

Daniel Weiss: Судебная экспертиза и вклад лингвиста в интерпретацию закона

Gasan Guseinov: Инструменты описания неполной коммуникации в блогосфере

Lara Ryazanova-Clarke:How Upright is the Vertical? Ideological Norm Negotiation in Russian Media Discourse

Michael S. Gorham: We Speak Russian! New Models of Norm Negotiation in the Electronic Media

Index