28 Jan 2009 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm | CRASSH, 17 Mill Lane |
- Description
Description
Speakers:
Felicitas Macgilchrist (European University Viadrina)
Lara Ryazanova-Clarke (University of Edinburgh)
Felicitas Macgilchrist
Language and Politics: Russia, Georgia and the West
Lara Ryazanova-Clarke (University of Edinburgh)
Putin, the Media and the Nation: Discursive Construction of National Identity in 'Direct Line with the President'
On the 18th October 2007, Russians were treated to an annual ritual that became a familiar feature of Putin’s presidency — a ‘discursive marathon’ of three or so hours of simultaneous radio and television broadcast of President Putin’s questions and answers session with the general public, known under the title Direct Line with the President. The last in the series of similar presidential spectacles, it was called ????????? both, in the programme’s language and outside it.
This contact between the President and the nation that had a conclusive note to it and was labelled by the media on the one hand, romantically, ???????? ? ????? and on the other, cynically, ??????-????????, and ?????? ??????????, in any case was an intensive exercise in the identity narrative to which both the information seekers and the information givers made their contribution.
The objective of this paper is therefore to examine this discursive event consisting of 21,695 words of the broadcast transcript and, by analyzing the verbal activity of the three parties: the President, the presenters and the public, to pinpoint the main trends in and linguistic strategies of, the co-construction of meanings pertaining to the national identity as it is seen in the late Putin’s era.
The paper will examine the construction or reconstruction of the following fields relating to national identity: magnitude, national space, time, “the other” and the leader.
The paper will reveal that the Direct Line with the President bears all the hallmarks of vigorous identity co-construction. A visible strand of the Direct Line is a represented discourse as it demonstrates connections with and borrowings from other discourses. One of more vivid discursive connection established is rehabilitation of the Soviet language. Altogether, the discourse of Direct Line emerges as a well choreographed linguistic construct that serves as a tool of production and reproduction of a set of strong ideological messages about what Russians should know and feel about themselves today.
Suggested reading:
Benwell, Bethan and Elizabeth Stokoe Discourse and Identity. Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
Blommaert, Jan Discourse. Cambridge University Press, 2004
Bourdieu Pierre Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity, 1991
This event is part of the Contemporary Russian Culture Studies Group Seminar series.
Meetings are held on alternate Wednesdays during term-time, 5pm to 7.00pm at CRASSH.
All welcome. No registration required.
Click on the link on the right hand side of the page to see the full programme for Lent Term.
For administrative enquiries please contact el269@cam.ac.uk.