Language on Display: Writers, Fiction and Linguistic Culture in Post-Soviet Russia - Paperback

by Ingunn Lunde (Author)

Post-Soviet Russia was a period of linguistic liberalisation, instability and change with varied attempts to regulate and legislate language usage, a time when the language question permeated all spheres of social, cultural and political life.
Key topics for debate included the Soviet linguistic legacy, the past and future of Russian, linguistic variation, language policy and linguistic ideologies. This book looks at how these debates featured in literature and illustrates the discussion through six interpretive readings of post-Soviet Russian prose. It analyses both the writers' explicit and implicit responses and in doing opens up new perspectives for sociolinguistic research on metalanguage.
Spanning a number of theoretical fields including language variation, language policy and literary stylistics, Ingunn Lunde provides a coherent way of triangulating these fields by the introduction of the concept of performative metalanguage. The book also offers insight into the role of writers in the broader social and political context of language culture in contemporary Russia and into the various ways in which the linguistic and aesthetic practices of literary art can engage in questions related to the negotiation of linguistic norms.

Front Jacket

'Like few others among her contemporaries, Lunde expertly bridges the disciplinary divide between language and literary studies. Language on Display is a rare philological gem that offers as much sociolinguistic insight into the complicated fate of the Russian language after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as it does critical illumination of the role writers play in both articulating and pushing the boundaries of language standards and norms.' Michael S. Gorham, University of Florida Post-Soviet Russia may be characterised by 'the language question' permeating all spheres of social, cultural and political life. Key topics in the language debate include the Soviet linguistic legacy, the status of the standard language, foreign loanwords, linguistic variation and language policy. In Language on Display, Ingunn Lunde explores the response of literature to the debate, offering six interpretive readings of post-Soviet Russian prose. Spanning a number of theoretical fields including language variation, linguistic ideologies and literary stylistics, she analyses writers' explicit and implicit responses to central topics of the language debate and in so doing opens up new perspectives for sociolinguistic research on metalanguage. By exploring the works of such writers as Evgenii Popov, Vladimir Sorokin, Tat'iana Tolstaia, Evgenii Vodolazkin, Valerii Votrin and Mikhail Gigolashvili, Language on Display sheds light both on the role of writers in the broader social and political context of language culture, and on the ways in which the aesthetic practices of literary art can engage with questions affecting the negotiation of linguistic norms. Ingunn Lunde is Professor of Russian at the University of Bergen. Cover design: [EUP logo] edinburghuniversitypress.com ISBN 978-1-4744-2156-0 Barcode

Author Biography

Ingunn Lunde is Professor of Russian in the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Bergen.