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Introduction To The Special Issue: Issues Of Teaching Media Literacy In Russian Language Education, Karen Evans-Romaine, Liudmila Klimanova

Russian Language Journal

The rapidly evolving political and cultural landscape of the contemporary world necessitates our continuous reevaluation of the competencies required for effective second language acquisition. As global communication and digital technologies continue to advance, the traditional paradigms of language learning must expand to include critical skills that enable learners to navigate and engage with the multifaceted media environment in the target language. In this context, media literacy emerges as a fundamental component of foreign language education, not only fostering linguistic proficiency but also emphasizing the significant role of analytical capabilities essential for discerning, scrutinizing, and interpreting information and disinformation as presented …

Mark Twain On The Soviet Silver Screen: Stalinist Laughter And Anti-Racism In Tom Soier, Cassio De Oliveira

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article is an analysis of the Soviet film Tom Soier, an adaptation of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn released in 1936, at the height of the Stalinist period. In the article, the author places the film in the context of the Soviet support of the Black struggle against racial segregation in America by showing how Tom Soier creatively combines the plots of Twain’s novels in order to propagate an antiracist message. Furthermore, by casting African American actors in the roles of Black enslaved characters, the film also engages with what Steven Lee has called the ethnic …

Russian Civic Criticism And The Idyllic Dream In Ivan Goncharov’S “Oblomov”, Cassio De Oliveira

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Nikolai Dobroliubov’s and Dmitrii Pisarev’s reviews of Ivan Goncharov’s novel Oblomov have gone into history as exemplars of Russian civic criticism. Their main argument centers on the eponymous protagonist’s seeming inability to exit his lethargic condition, which they interpret as a symptom of the Russian status quo at the time of the Great Reforms. In the present article, I argue that the case of Oblomov demonstrates the limits of the civics’ mimetic criticism. The dominant chronotope of the novel, namely the idyll, indicates that Oblomov is not in essence a novel about the hero’s inability to change (which would presuppose …

“Comrade Woman” In 21st-Century Serbia: (Dis)Continuities Of Yugoslav Feminism In Post-Yugoslav, Post-War Serbian Feminism, Heyu Yuan

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Forty-five years have passed since 1978, when the first feminist conference in the Eastern Bloc – Drug-ca žena – žensko pitanje: novi pristup? (Comrade Woman – The Woman’s Question: A New Approach?) – took place in Belgrade in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). After the violent breakup of the SFRY, what, if anything, is left of the legacies of Yugoslav feminism in today’s Serbia? To answer this question, this research examines the Serbian feminist scenes across time through literature and five semi-structured interviews. It concludes that although the Serbian feminist movement has become significantly different from the Yugoslav …

The Confounding Body: Female Corporeality, Androgyny, And Disgust In The Work Of Virginia Woolf And Zinaida Gippius, Yelizaveta Shapiro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Confounding Body: Female Corporeality, Androgyny, and Disgust in the Work of Virginia Woolf and Zinaida Gippius examines how the discourses of degeneration, eugenics, and sexology shaped representations of women’s bodies in British and Russian modernist literature. Focusing on the writing of Zinaida Gippius (1869-1945) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), I challenge the longstanding argument that both authors attempted to escape the material body by resorting to androgynous tropes. I argue that the material female body takes center stage in both Gippius’s and Woolf’s work and functions as a powerfully paradoxical entity: one that generates disgust and enables oppression while housing …

Audible Futures: Scenes Of Sonic Encounter In Cold War Kurdistan, 1923–2023, Nicholas S. Glastonbury

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines a century of cultural politics in Kurdistan, from 1923 to 2023, and it does so from a relatively marginal vantage point in most histories of Kurdistan: that of the Soviet Caucasus. It takes as its primary object the cultural and political itineraries of sonic media and listening in Kurdistan, from Soviet Kurdish radio broadcasting and pirated cassettes to postsocialist archives, DJ booths, and streaming music. These itineraries map not only the emergence and circulation of Kurdish notions of tradition, heritage, and cultural memory, but also the methods of counterinsurgency deployed by the states that occupy Kurdistan. In …

A Computational Analysis Of Volodymyr Zelenskyy's Public Diplomacy Discourse In Times Of Crisis, Amber Brittain-Hale, Amber Brittain-Hale

Education Division Scholarship

In this study, we delve into the public diplomacy discourse of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during the ongoing crisis of the Russo-Ukrainian War. We aim to conduct a computational analysis of Zelenskyy's English, Russian, and Ukrainian speeches, exploring the linguistic patterns and code-switching employed in his discourse. The study period encompasses Russia’s build-up to and full-scale invasion of Ukraine from May 2019 to May 30, 2023. This time frame is crucial as it captures the dynamic development of the crisis and the expansion of Zelenskyy's presidency, providing a unique context for analyzing his public diplomacy efforts. By utilizing Linguistic Inquiry …

Digital Tools For Mastering Oral Proficiency, Irina Ivliyeva

Arts, Languages and Philosophy Faculty Research & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Enrico Pea And The Awareness Of Never-Ending Detachment (Alexandria, Egypt 1896–1914), Stefano Giannini

Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics - All Scholarship

This chapter analyzes the postcolonial discourse in Italy, through the voice of the novelist and playwright Enrico Pea (1881–1958). Living outside of Italy, Pea gained a unique awareness of the notion of multi-ethnic societies, of the concepts of nationality, borders, and boundaries. Alexandria, Egypt, is Pea’s referential space. It is a center, and at the same time, a marginal place. Alexandrea ad Egyptum, that is, the door to Egypt, as it was known in antiquity, this city brought together Arab and European artistic experiences that converged on, and were triggered by, its multicultural profile. The history of political exile …

Experimental Multi-Dimensional Scaling Of Web-Scraping Results From The A.A Zalizniak Grammatical Dictionary And The Russian National Corpus. Creating A Corpus Fragment Of All Possible Word-Forms Of Modified Russian Sound Verbs Using Web-Scraping Methodology. Compilation Of A Summary Table For The Present Tense, Future Tense, Imperative, Imperfective And Perfective Gerund Forms., Irina Ivliyeva, Perry Koob

Research Data

The emergence and development of electronic versions of dictionaries and corpus databases allows the researcher to finally do what was technically impossible on paper: to collect, compile and analyze the entire index of all possible verbal forms of different ranges and scales. This project attempts to improve the method of web extraction in relation to the source material (lexical-semantic group of Russian sound verbs, semantically modified at the word-forming level) and summarize the search results as an interactive summary table. A novel, four-position system of numbering the verbal forms have been introduced and a subsequent experimental multi-dimensional scaling of results …

Minority Language Education In Russia: An Example Of Social And Cultural Reproduction And Correspondence Theories, Nadezhda Braun

Russian Language Journal

Russia is an incredibly diverse country, both linguistically and ethnically. However, Russia is often presented, and presents itself, as a monolith. Russia’s approach to minority language teaching further perpetuates this monolithic view by creating a hierarchical language structure with Russian at the top. This hierarchy is created through societal pressure, language requirements in the Russian education system, and the minimization of minority language instruction, in direct contrast to best practices for language instruction. Chuvash in Chuvashia and Nenets, Khanty, and Selkup in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug serve as examples of this linguistic hierarchy. This paper uses social and cultural reproduction …

Literature As An "Affective Magnet": Defining, Engaging And Investigating Emotions In A (Russian) Language-Literature Classroom, Sofya Yunusova

Russian Language Journal

The purpose of this article is to conceptualize affective processes in reading literature in a foreign language. While generations of scholars and methodologists have stressed the educational potential of literary texts in terms of engaging learners’ emotions, the field has a relatively poor research base for discussing what these reading-induced emotions are and how to systematically promote them in a language-literature classroom. To this end, the current study first conceptualizes the different types of emotions that are arguably involved in reading literature in a foreign language and then formulates a set of pedagogical principles to foster their emergence in a …

A Corpus-Based Analysis Of Vvodnye Slova: Pedagogical Applications, Joan F. Chevalier

Russian Language Journal

Parenthetical expressions referred to as vvodnye slova in Russian have remained on the periphery of Russian linguistics. This is, no doubt, due to the fact that they are heterogeneous and difficult to define as a category. Traditional and more recent approaches to vvodnye slova are discussed. Vvodnye slova play a key role in expressing authorial stance and in organizing and providing cohesion to texts. On the basis of these two main functional characteristics, an argument is made for the inclusion of vvodnye slova in Russian Language L2 curricula. This corpus-based study establishes frequency patterns for semantic sub-groups of vvodnye slova …

Russian L2 Learners' And Teachers' Perceptions Of Learning Affordances, Marina Tsylina, Jose Luis Garrido Rivera, Hadis Ghaedi

Russian Language Journal

The environment offers a variety of resources for language learning and teaching. However, students and teachers might not recognize the same affordances or may perceive them differently. The mismatch between instructors’ and learners’ perceived affordances may result in ineffective use of time for both students and teachers, lower student motivation, and retard the language learning process. The study draws on the ecological approach (van Lier, 2000) to second language acquisition to investigate L2 Russian learners’ and teachers’ perceptions of language learning affordances, i.e., any physical objects, online materials, humans, and other resources which are embedded in the environment, and emerge …

Эвфемия Как Инструмент Создания Альтернативной Реальности В Российских Пропагандистских Медиа (На Примере Освещения Войны России Против Украины), Ksenia Turkova (Kiriya)

Russian Language Journal

В российском общественно-политическом и новостном дискурсе эвфемизмы уже на протяжении многих лет используются как один из главных манипулятивных приемов. Так, во время финансового кризиса 2008 года СМИ практически не использовали слово “кризис” — сотрудникам государственных телеканалов рекомендовалось его избегать и использовать вместо этого такие словосочетания, “финансовые трудности”, “финансовые проблемы” или обязательно добавлять к слову “кризис” прилагательное “мировой”, чтобы показать, что в России кризиса нет. Агрессию против Грузии в 2008 году официально называли не войной, а “операцией по принуждению к миру”. Аннексию Крыма в 2014 году — “присоединением” или даже “воссоединением”, делая акцент на “возвращении” полуострова. Масштабная программа под названием “реновация” …

Review: Dostoevsky's Crime And Punishment. A Reader's Guide, Michael Ossorgin

Russian Language Journal

For decades, Martinsen fostered international dialogue on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, gathering interpretations from the most dedicated students and scholars. Her reader's guide distills this criticism into a concise, accessible handbook, an authoritative scholarly guide in English. Martinsen' s guide is handy for syllabus writing and as a teaching supplement to cover the novel's central themes and narrative techniques.

Rlj Volume 73, Number 1 Full Issue

Russian Language Journal

No abstract provided.

Victor Pelevin And Eurasianist Geopolitics, Tatiana Filimonova

Dartmouth Scholarship

The first decades of Victor Pelevin’s writing coincided with the burst in popularity of neo-Eurasianist and neo-imperialist ideas. This paper traces the various forms that Pelevin’s treatment of civilizational and geopolitically focused ideologies has taken over the course of his career. His preoccupation with these ideas ranges from inconspicuous reflection of the Eurasian phenomenon to Eurasianism’s intensifying critique, and, eventually, to a more comprehensive engagement with concepts of classical geopolitics. If early on Pelevin’s portrayal of neo-imperialists and their ideas has been largely satirical (Empire V, 2006), in the 2010s his texts began to demonstrate a deeper entanglement …

Introduction, Liudmila Klimanova Phd

Russian Language Journal

On behalf of the editorial team of the Russian Language Journal, it is with great pleasure that we present Volume 73, Number 1. This issue, available exclusively online, features six articles and two book reviews that span a broad spectrum of topics within Russian language studies. The issue opens with Nadezhda Braun's exploration of how Russian minority languages are minimized through Russian educational policies. Sofya Yunusova investigates the educational potential of literary texts in eliciting affective responses in the language-literature classroom. Joan A. Chevalier's study explores the semantic value of connecting phrases and conjunctions, providing insights into the linguistic …

L2 Writing As A Tool For Improving L2 Speaking Accuracy Through Text-Reconstruction Tasks In A Communicative Language Classroom, Natalia Sletova

Russian Language Journal

This study’s objective was to attract researchers’ attention to the potential role second language (L2) writing can play in improving L2 speaking grammatical accuracy in a communicative language classroom. Twenty-three beginner, twenty-one intermediate, and twenty advanced English learners of Russian completed a ‘noticing the gap’ activity using a text-reconstruction task in both written and spoken modalities, followed by a second text-reconstruction only in the spoken mode. The responses were measured for syntactic and semantic accuracy and complexity. The results indicated that lexical diversity and semantic complexity of produced output significantly improved with each level of proficiency in both written and …

Review: Student-Centered Approaches To Russian Language Teaching: Insights, Strategies, And Adaptations, William J. Comer

Russian Language Journal

This volume consists of twelve chapters, three written by the editors setting an overview of "student-centered teaching" (two at the start of the volume and one at the end), with nine chapters in the middle, written by different authors. These nine center chapters share a basic structure: an opening statement of the problem they will look at, a Russian-language version of that overview, then several pages of theory/background on the specific topic being addressed, and then a discussion of the specific study/intervention conducted. Each chapter ends with both a conclusion and a "lessons learned" section. Each of the nine center …

Свет Слов. Стихи Декабря 2022 — Мая 2023., Victor Fet

Open Access Books

Фет, В. Свет слов. Стихи декабря 2022 — мая 2023. Київ: Друкарський двiр Олега Федорова. 2023. 148 с.

Эта книга — продолжение двух предыдущих книг стихов, «Над бездной» и «Ткань памяти» (К.: Друкарський двiр Олега Федорова, 2022). Сюда вошли стихи, написанные с декабря 2022 по май 2023. Многие, кто писал по-русски по всему миру, сейчас замолчали от шока и боли. Со мной случилось так, что после Крыма (2014) я вообще перестал писать стихи; мне казалось, что я уже написал всё, что мог. Но война прорвала этот затор, и стихи текут уже более года постоянным потоком, почти ежедневно. Похоже, …

The Search For Existential Meaning: Tracing Leo Tolstoy’S Nihilism Through His Later Works, Elisabeth Koyfman

Student Theses and Dissertations

In this senior thesis, I explore the writings of acclaimed 19th-century author Leo Tolstoy through the lens of existential and ethical nihilism: a philosophical ideology espousing an assertion of a meaningless existence shaped by similarly meaningless governing social, political, and religious conventions. Prior to the author’s religious conversion at the age of 50, Tolstoy’s writings reflected a nihilistic worldview that opposed any socially accepted definition of a meaningful existence. Although within the span of 1800s Russia nihilism was strongly associated with atheism and terrorism, Tolstoy distanced himself from any accepted cultural value or label—including the negative political associations and other …

Morphosemantic Integration Of -Ing Anglicisms Into Russian And Kazakh In The Context Of Trilingual Code-Switching, Timur Akishev

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The current dissertation is an attempt to determine and describe the characteristics of the process of linguistic integration of English noun loans into Russian and Kazakh. One of the main objectives that my study was guided by was the analysis of the relationships between or across the linguistic and quantitative parameters of the loans based on the data drawn from the Russian National Corpus, an online database containing multiple examples of using the Russian language. Another important objective of the research conducted was to provide a holistic interpretation to the process of secondary adaptation of the nominal Anglicisms from Russian …

Echoes Of Eternity: The (Meta)Physics Of Time And Space In Eugene Vodolazkin's Laurus, Samuel Jayasi

World Languages, Literatures and Cultures Honors Theses

This study will consider ways in which Eugene Vodolazkin demonstrates his aesthetic and cultural understanding of what he calls “Christian reenchantment” in his novel Laurus. While “national medievalism” and “Christian reenchantment” share concerns about postmodernism, Vodolazkin’s novel investigates not so much issues of Russian national identity, but the consciousness of the age itself. Leaving aside any possibility of representing some kind of new utopia to counter the problems of postmodernism as too historically traumatic, Vodolazkin recreates the “medieval mindset” as a way to introduce “Christian reenchantment” of the (fictional) world. In the novel, the return to the medieval way …

Три Шага К Свободе (In Russian), Slav Gratchev

Open Access Books

Грачев, Слав. Три шага к свободе. Библиотекa университета Маршалла, Хантингтон, 2023.

Три шага к свободе — это первый роман исторической трилогии, которая перенесет вас в страшный мир разрушений и отчаянной борьбы за жизнь в Советском Союзе во время сталинских репрессий, Второй мировой войны, и жизни при коммунистическом режиме в 1980-х годах. События, описанные в романе, а также жесткая критика коммунизма, его бесчеловечного лица и его далекой от всякого гуманизма философии, привели бы автора к немедленному тюремному заключению, находись он в путинской России сегодня. К счастью, он не там, а значит, он сможет закончить свою работу и опубликовать все книги этой …

В Поисках Снарка, Victor Fet

Open Access Books

Фет, В. В поисках Снарка. Библиотека Университета Маршалла, Хантингтон. 2023. 434 с.

Этот том содержит статьи и рецензии Виктора Фета (1955 г.р.), написанные и опубликованные в 1995-2022 гг на различные темы, от истории науки до рецензий на театральные спектакли. Автор, биолог по профессии, который провёл первую половину жизни (1955-1988) в СССР, соединяет глубоко личный опыт, воспоминания и наблюдения, преследуя одну основную тему: уникальность творчества во всех аспектах гуманитарных и естественных наук. Интересы автора прежде всего фокусиртуются на двух очень разных, но не независимых фигурах Льюиса Кэрролла и Владимира Набокова. В наши дни, при быстром распаде и трансформации русской культуры, …

Raising The Iron Curtain: Healing Collective Oppression Through Literature, Alisa Chirkova-Holland

Student Works

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by former gulag prisoner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, is a short novel that entails an ordinary day for a prisoner, Shukhov, in a Siberian gulag. Although the work is a typical skaz, a traditional Russian narrative form, the novel was well-received by Russians at the time of publishing in 1962. This paper will explore the reason for such acclamation, understanding how Solzhenitsyn’s innovations to the skaz allowed readers to connect with their past. The paper also mentions theories such as Traumatic Realism to comprehend how such a bleak novel positively impacted post-Stalinist readers. …

Blood Cries Out From The Ground: The Einsatzgruppen And The Holocaust In Ukraine, Lauren R. Letizia

Student Publications

After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Wehrmacht occupied much of the western Soviet regions. The Third Reich deployed special killing squads known as the Einsatzgruppen to protect its military and ideological interests. These units were responsible for murdering over two million Jews from 1941 to 1944, primarily through mass shootings. Ukraine was one of the most afflicted countries by this “Holocaust by Bullets.” Because of the efficient genocidal techniques of Einsatzgruppen units operating in the region, one in four Jews who perished in the Holocaust was Ukrainian. The scale on which these killings …

Stolperstein/Stumbling Stone For Holocaust Survivor Otto Heimann/Bob Hymann, Bochum/German, Toronto/Kanada Und New York, Ny, Usa, Courtney Conte, Mona Eikel-Pohen

Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics - All Scholarship

The documentation tries to capture the life of Holocaust survivor Otto Heimann/Bob Hyman who spent his youth in Bochum-Langendreer, Germany, and was forced by the National Socialists to leave parents, home, and country. The documentation does not claim to give a full picture, just an insight into Otto Heimann's/Bob Hyman's life.

It will be read out on June 6, 2023 in Bochum, Germany when a Stolperstein, a stumbling stone, will be place near Alte Bahnhstraße 6 in Bochum-Langendreer, Germany, to commemorate Otto Heimann/Bob Hyman, so that we and future generations may learn from history.

Diese Dokumentation versucht, das Leben Bob …