Post-Russian Eurasia and the proto-Eurasian usage of the Runet in Kazakhstan: A plea for a cyberlinguistic turn in area studies

AbstractDrawing on the theoretical discussion of common features of cultures in the post-Soviet space, this paper proposes to refocus on the linguistic dimension and to investigate post-Russian Eurasia. Is not the role of the Russian language coming under serious challenge in the post-Soviet context, where independent states are downgrading the status of Russian in administration and education and where ethnic Russians are ‘remigrating’ from former Soviet republics to the Russian Federation? There is, however, one medium in which Russian is gaining new significance as a language of inter-regional communication: the Internet. Albeit to a lesser degree than English and Chinese, Russian serves as a means of communication between Russian-speaking communities all over the world. What is more, the Russian Internet (Runet) offers access to elaborated resources of contemporary culture (video and music downloads etc.).The paper discusses the role the Russian-based Runet plays for Eurasian webcommunities outside the Russian Federation, mostly relying on Kazakh material, and asks whether post-colonial anxieties about Russian cultural imperialism through the Runet are justified or not and what the Kazakh, possibly post-colonial strategies of coping with this situation are. Essential to this essay is the notion of cyberimperialism, which combines aspects of media studies with post-colonial studies. The interdisciplinary approach to Internet studies is completed by a linguistic focus on the performativity of language usage online for creating situational language identities. The essay rounds off by offering an analysis of Nursultan Nazarbaev’s ambiguous inclusive-exclusive logic of argumentation and confronting it with Russian Eurasianism

Aktuelle Themen und Methoden der Philosophiegeschichtsschreibung (mit Schwerpunkt russische Philosophie des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts)

0. Philosophiegeschichtsschreibung als Konstruktion 1. Neu- und Wiederaneignungen 2. Fokus Religionsphilosophie 3. Bedingungen philosophischen Schreibens zur Sowjetzeit 4. Kulturgeschichte 5. Argumentationslogische und poststrukturalistische Lesarten 6. Kontinuitäten 7. Institutionen 8. Ost-, ostmittel-, südosteuropäische Gemeinsamkeiten? 9. Neuere Referenzwerke zu weiteren Philosophiegeschichten 10. Bibliographi

"Одну норму за себя, одну - за Павку!": Литература и литературная критика эпохи соцреализма как инструмент социального контроля

Nikolai Ostrowskis Debütroman "Wie der Stahl gehärtet wurde" war ein bedeutendes Werk im literarischen Kanon des sozialistischen Realismus, mit einer scheinbar klaren Trennung von Feinden und Freunden. In dem vorliegenden Beitrag wird diese Eindeutigkeit in Frage gestellt. Es wird argumentiert, dass der Erfolg und die propagandistische Nutzung des Romans gerade wegen seiner Mehrdeutigkeit möglich waren. Der Text wird im Kontext der andauernden Präsenz des christlichen Opfers sowie der Modifikationen christlicher Bildmuster in der Literatur des sozialistischen Realismus untersucht. Dazu wird Ostrovskys Roman mit den Begründungen für das Opfer Christi verglichen, die im Neuen Testament enthalten sind, wobei dem Christus-Hymnus besondere Aufmerksamkeit gewidmet wird. Es wird die Hypothese überprüft, dass ein ähnlicher Aufruf zur Selbsterniedrigung in Ostrovskys Roman zu finden ist und die sowjetische Propaganda dazu beigetragen hat, dass dieser Aufruf durch die Rezeptionsgeschichte dieses Textes zog

Самоуничижение Христа

Russian-language edition: This three-volume book investigates the Russian transformations of one of the central concepts of Greek Christology, the self-humiliation or kenosis of Christ. The author applies rhetoric (paradox, metaphor, metonymy) as a means to elucidate mechanisms of theological persuasion and to trace the representations of the humiliated Christ and his imitations in various media from liturgy and iconology to everyday practice and literary fiction. The exploration of post-Christian literature of the 19th and 20th century (N. Chernyshevskii, M. Gor’kii, N. Ostrovskii, Ven. Erofeev, Vl. Sorokin) demonstrates the existence of a kenotic Christology after Christianity

Bulletin der deutschen Slavistik 17.2011

Bulletin der deutschen Slavistik 17, 201

Bulletin der deutschen Slavistik 24.2018

Jahrbuch der Deutschen Slavistik mit Forumsbeiträgen zu Digital Humanities, Rubriken zu Personen, Publikationen, Preisen, Wirkungsorten, wissenschaftlichen Abhandlungen

Litwo! Wschodzie mój!

This article proposes a shift in Polish postcolonial studies from the discourse analysis of external imaginations of Poland as a kind of “Orient” (as exemplified in Larry Wolff’s In-venting Eastern Europe, 1994) to explorations of Polish self-descriptions in the sense of sub-versive “self-Orientalisation”. Drawing on the analogy of Iberian Moors and Lithuanians as presented in Adam Mickiewicz’s Konrad Wallenrod (1828), Lithuania is analysed as Po-land’s “other”, as both close and alien, as “one’s own Orient”. Special attention is paid to the psycho-biography of the colonised personality Konrad Wallenrod, to his betrayal and to his conspiratorial communication with Aldona and Halban, which appears as an aporetic means of subaltern self-assertion

Herbert’s Postcolonial Antiquity and Defensive Nationalism

The Polish version of this article was published in Roczniki Humanistyczne vol. 65, issue 1 (2017). This paper proposes a postcolonial reading of antiquity motifs from Zbigniew Herbert’s po-ems from the times of socialism. References to ancient history, mythology, and biblical allusions are interpreted as allegories of the political culture in the Polish People’s Republic. While in his poems written between 1956 and 1990 Herbert depicts communism as an attempt at Russian colonization of Poland, in seminal texts the focus lies mainly on the internal effects for the Polish colonized mind. Linking communist Moscow to ancient Rome, Herbert accomplishes a peculiar anti-imperial translatio imperii. It is this trans-chronic perspective of Herbert’s poems which allows for rounding off the paper with connecting Herbert’s anti-imperial attitude with defensive nationalism and proposing recent right-wing tendencies in the Polish appropriation of post-colonial theory (Ewa Thompson et al.) as a heuristic model for understanding Herbert’s civil position during communism