Browsing by Subject "Russian"
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Item The clarity of the Cold War: truth and literary communism between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. in the era of postmodern globalization.(2012-07) Gill, Meredith MorganThis dissertation examines the cultural logic of the Cold War, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, as a symptom of postmodern globalization. Following Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson's 1947 proclamation that Cold War propaganda should be crafted as "clearer than truth," this study investigates the complicated relationships among truth, production, and interpretation that emerged in similar manners between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. during the Cold War period. In particular, I consider literary, visual, and critical texts that contest a logic of truth which seeks to dissociate truth from its conditions of production. In so doing, I assert that a second Cold War took place between a global creative class, which has been termed "the multitude," and the (unwittingly) allied forces of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Accordingly, I argue that the Cold War cannot be understood simply as a battle between East and West, capitalism and communism, two world orders, or disparate modes of production. In chapter one, I explore the transition to postmodernism, as the cultural logic of late capitalism, to detail the changing conditions for aesthetic and political dissent against the neo-liberal management of American capitalism and the socialist management of Soviet state capitalism. I explore diplomatic correspondences between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. as well as a number of examples of aesthetic dissent ranging from popular magazines to Soviet subcultures to Leftist American avant-garde visual art and a ten-year old American schoolgirl's quest to discover the truth about the Cold War. In chapter two, I provide a close reading of E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, a meta-fictional, "autobiographical" novel about political life during the Cold War period. I read this text alongside Louis Althusser's autobiography, The Future Lasts Forever, to examine the complexities of locating truth that have resulted from postmodernity's complication of the distinction between subjects and objects. Chapter three presents a historical case study of how the concept of truth was contested within samizdat, the underground late-Soviet self-publishing movement. In particular, I look at Metropol, a 1979 samizdat literary anthology, which, I argue exemplifies a form of literary communism within the creative block of actually lived "communism." The fourth and final chapter explores the autobiography of Assata Shakur--communist, former Black Panther, and escaped convict who writes from socialist Cuba. I argue that the complex interplay of narrative forms in her text, as well as her use of intuition as a methodology, exposes a logic of truth that is non-representational, points to similarities between late capitalist and prison temporalities, and radically remaps the discursive parameters of the Cold War.Item Let's Beat the Bed Bug task sheet: Russian(University of Minnesota Extension, 2011) Shindelar, Amelia; Kells, StephenItem The syntax-pragmatics interface in language loss: covert restructuring of aspect in heritage Russian.(2010-05) Laleko, Oksana VladislavovnaHeritage grammars, linguistic varieties emerging in the context of intergenerational language loss, are known to diverge from the corresponding full-fledged baseline varieties in principled and systematic ways, as typically illustrated by errors made by heritage speakers in production. This dissertation examines covert restructuring of aspect in heritage Russian, a grammatical reorganization of the perfective-imperfective opposition not manifested in overt errors. The aspectual system instantiated in acrolectal varieties of heritage Russian is shown to exhibit signs of covert divergence from the baseline system at the interface between syntax and discourse-pragmatics, manifested in a reduction of pragmatically-conditioned functions of the imperfective aspect with total single events. This emerging restriction leads to a gradual shift from a privative aspectual opposition in baseline Russian, where imperfective is the unmarked member, to an opposition of the equipollent type. Experimental evidence presented suggests that heritage speakers differ from baseline Russian speakers in their use, acceptability ratings, and accuracy of interpretation of the imperfective aspect. In Russian, both aspects are compatible with completed events; however, aspectual competition is resolved in favor of the imperfective in the presence of discourse-pragmatic triggers that condition the general-factual functions of the imperfective: statement of fact, annulled result, thematicity and backgrounding. Assuming a multi-level approach to aspect, I maintain that the two aspectual systems converge on the level of the verbal predicate, where aspectual values of activities and accomplishments reflect compositional telicity, but diverge on the level of sentential aspect, where the contribution of telicity may be overridden by grammatical aspectual operators and discourse-pragmatic aspectual triggers. The restructuring of aspect in advanced heritage grammars affects the highest level of sentential structure, a domain in which syntactic information is mapped onto discourse-pragmatic information (the C-domain). In addressing the role of linguistic input in heritage language acquisition, the dissertation examines additional data from bilingual Russian-English speakers, including parents of heritage speakers. While bilingual speakers pattern with monolingual controls on comprehension tests, they differ from monolinguals in production of the imperfective with total single events, suggesting that competence divergence in advanced heritage grammars may be linked, across generations, to impoverished performance on C-domain properties.