scholarly journals The Didactic Function of the Autobiographical Story (On the Dialect Material)

2021 ◽  
pp. 38-54
Author(s):  
Svetlana V. Voloshina ◽  

The aim of the article is to identify the means of linguistic expression of the di-dactic function and the factors of this function’s implementation in dialectal autobio-graphical stories. The material of the research is 120 oral autobiographical stories, which were recorded in Tomsk Oblast from the 1960s to 2018 during dialectological expeditions. The source of the material is the texts of the Tomsk dialect corpus (http://losl.tsu.ru/?q=corpus), as well as audio recordings of dialect speech, made by the author of the article during the expeditions in villages Pervomayskoe, Pervomayskiy District of Tomsk Oblast, in 2008, and Melnikovo, Shegarskiy District of Tomsk Ob-last, in 2017–2019. The didactic function is understood as the ability of autobiographical stories, in a broad sense, to be a tool of training, education, transfer of important knowledge about the world, accompanied by the desire of the stories’ authors to teach interlocutors, to explain something to them, to give advice. The author of the article identified the factors of implementing the didactic function in the autobio-graphical story. Among them are: 1) the specificity of dialect discourse: it is focused on tradition, its preservation and translation; 2) the genre of the material: since autobio-graphical texts have a retrospective orientation, informants, reporting on their lives, give an example, a model for the interlocutor to follow, or, vice versa, to avoid errors in life, not to repeat them; 3) the communicative situation and its components: first of all, these are participants of communication – a dialectologist and an informant; they be-long to different types of culture, and informants therefore strengthen the interpretive element in their stories, explaining what a word means, where and how an object is used, etc. As a rule, informants are older, so they give recommendations to dialectolo-gists, teach them: Now, girls, you live in a good century. It is just necessary to work, just to work. To learn, to work, and then all will be well. So, girls, live, take care of your life. Take care of life. The theme, time and space of communication were also identified among the components of the communicative situation. All these factors take part in the representation of the didactic function. It is determined that didacticism can be expressed in the speech genres of advice, explanation, and culinary recipe. The di-dactic function is represented by imperative statements, words of the category of state, statements reflecting informants’ values and ideas about ethical and moral categories, by infinitive constructions, statements with verbs in the form of abstract present or fu-ture tenses, lexemes expressing moral values. It has been determined that the didacti-cism of autobiographical texts is associated with the self-reflection of informants about their lives and, more broadly, with the analysis of generational experience.

2021 ◽  
pp. 089692052110441
Author(s):  
Eran Fisher

This article explores the ontology of personal knowledge that algorithms on digital media create by locating it on two axes: historical and theoretical. Digital platforms continue a long history of epistemic media—media forms and practices, which not only communicate knowledge, but also create knowledge. As epistemic media allowed a new way to know the world, they also facilitated a new way of knowing the self. This historical perspective also underscores a key difference of digital platforms from previous epistemic media: their exclusion of self-reflection from the creation of knowledge about the self. To evaluate the ramifications of that omission, I use Habermas’s theory of knowledge, which distinguishes critical knowledge from other types of knowledge, and sees it as corresponding with a human interest in emancipation. Critical knowledge about the self, as exemplified by psychoanalysis, must involve self-reflection. As the self gains critical knowledge, deciphering the conditions under which positivist and hermeneutic knowledges are valid, it is also able to transform them and expand its realm of freedom, or subjectivity. As digital media subverts this process by demoting self-reflection, it also undermines subjectivity.


Author(s):  
Maria Luisa Martino ◽  
Maria Francesca Freda

The concept that a traumatic experience, such as a cancer, can lead to a positive change and transformation of self, life and relationships was named as post-traumatic growth (PTG). A large amount of research measured PTG in cancer survivors arguing an interpretation of the construct as an outcome. Recently, qualitative research shows different types of narrative of PTG, but the narrative markers and their functions of transformation remain still unclear. Within a mixed-method, we aim to highlight the narrative markers and their transformative functions, underlying the PTG, within 12 cancer survivors’ narratives with medium/high and medium/low level of PTG. A redemptive sequence analysis was carried out. In the narratives with high/medium PTG we find a specific transformative function on-thinking focused transformation founded on the change/expansion of the own internal criteria to interpret the relationship with the world centralizing the self in the present and future; in the narratives with medium/low PTG we find an on-acting focused transformation, founded on the change of the operational procedures aimed to live centered on the present and on its moments.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franz-Josef Arlinghaus

Fourteenth to sixteenth century Libri di Famiglia and housebooks (Hausbücher) – that of the jurist Giovanni Gaspare da Sala from Milan and the merchants Ugolino dì Nicolò Martelli and Goro Dati from Florence as well as those of Lucas Rem from Augsburg and Hermann von Weinsberg from Cologne – are analyzed in this paper. These writings are compared with high medieval autobiographical texts (Guibert von Nogent, Abaelard) and with modern autobiographies (namely Roland Barthes). At a first glance, high medieval autobiographical texts seem to be much more explicit in respect of the authors ‘self’ than the Libri di famiglia and housebooks of the late middle ages and early modern times.Drawing on theoretical approaches developed by literary studies (Literaturwissenschaften) and sociology, which suggest a different reading of our late medieval sources, not only those parts of the Libri di famiglia that explicitly deal with the authors self are taken into account. Rather, the whole book (including the notes that inform about business transactions and everyday political events) are seen as part of a self-construction. The analysis then does not only make use of these often neglected contents of the libri di famiglia and housebooks, but also looks at the form of the written text the language used. It turned out that the respective authors of the housebooks and Libri di famiglia creatively combine different styles of writing (in form as well as in content), thus documenting their self-esteem and self-consciousness.However, the overall paradigm that is revealed is that of inscribing one´s own self in society, constructing the ‘I’ as an important and outstanding part of the world (labeled ‘inclusion individuality’). Notwithstanding all differences, the late medieval autobiographical texts share this paradigm with the high medieval sources mentioned. In sharp contrast to that, modern autobiographies place the self in opposition to or even outside society, not necessarily providing it with more self-confidence, but with a completely different attitude towards the ‘I’ and very distinct concepts about the self. The reason for this is not so much seen in developments of higher self-reflection but in structures of society that provide or do not provide a place for the self in society.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Lobo

The era of post-modernity has completely changed the way that we see, recognize and question the world, and what we accept to be true. During and after the 1960s many witnessed the rise of a greater multiplicity of local narratives. Prior to this, the grand narratives of the past, such as religion, the Enlightenment, and science were taken as whole, singular truths. However, such metanarratives tend to ignore the individual experiences that do not fit neatly into categories constructed by major institutional authorities. This disconnection from the personal pushed more people to doubt, in favour of the narrative(s) where the Self is visible and heard. It can be argued that this revolution in thought, and meaning and narrative-making in America grew after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. By examining Jean-Francois Lyotard’s theory of postmodernity, and those who expanded on his ideas, we can highlight how the assassination of JFK marked the onset and rise of the postmodern conspiracy theory. This includes the deconstruction of trust, the breakdown of “objective” reality and identity markers as well as the use of new mass media technologies, such as the film camera and the television.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-11

This paper arises from a presentation at the International Mediation and Restorative Practice Conference held at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth on 5th September 2014. The topic is the technique known as reframing. To reframe is to bring about a change in someone’s mental perspective by altering their tacit underlying viewpoint to create different meaning. It is an attempt to release the parties from a blame and counter-blame cycle, and to focus on more useful ways of viewing the conflict. It is not about over-looking or evading some negative sentiment - this needs to be included to maintain the context. What reframing does, however, is to introduce new meaning, co-existent with the negative perspective, which shifts the mind-set towards a more constructive future. A ‘frame’ is a cognitive shortcut that people use to make sense of the world. It is a complex mental structure of unquestioned beliefs, values and ideas that is used to simplify our understanding of the world around us and thus to infer meaning. If a part of that frame is changed – for example through self-reflection, education or reframing - then the inferred meaning may also change. When parties are in conflict their frames help them to interpret what has happened, what the intentions of the other party are, and their own role in what has taken place. This is usually positively disposed to the self and negatively disposed to the other. This lens, or frame, provides meaning for the conflict. Reframing upsets this frame and introduces a different, and potentially more helpful way to look at the conflict so that the parties will work on resolution rather than being stuck on set, negative, unproductive or toxic ways of viewing matters, or being defensive and closed-minded.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. 595-605
Author(s):  
Aleksey O. Bezzubikov

The article provides the analysis of mytho­logical dimension of the film “Ilych’s Gate” (Zastava Ilycha) by M.M. Khutsiev. The author concludes that the text of this film represents self-reflexive structure. Firstly, the plot of the film quite clearly depicts the mythological perception of reality. Secondly, the course of narration reproduces the influence of mytho­logical codes on the perception of the audience. The text of the film contains a description of its own mechanism of influence on the viewer as well as the processes taking place in the minds of the audience at the moment of viewing.The first part informs of the main principles of mytho­logical thinking and the idea of time and space in the myth, referring to the works by C. Lévi-Strauss, R. Barthes, M. Eliade, A. Losev, E. Cassirer and others. Special attention is paid to the role of myth and initiation ritual in the psychological formation of a personality, as, based on the following, this is the theme that forms the basis of the film plot.The second part deals with the methods by which the mythological dimension is manifested in the text of the film.In the third part, the researcher shows how the contrast of secular and sacral becomes the main semantic opposition promoting the motion of the plot.In the fourth part, the author proves that the reflection of reality in the characters’ minds is a referent of the images shown on the screen. The characters’ development lies in the actualization of the sacral and mythological perception of the world. In turn, the cultural codes contained in the text of the film are designed to evoke a kind of response in the minds of the audience — to actualize the same sacred modus of perception in its ideas, the achievement of which is the ultimate goal of the characters. Thus, the inner path of the characters in the film reflects the processes that excite the studied film in the perception of the audience.The relevance of the article lies in the discovery and description of the principle of self-reflection in the structure of the film “Ilych’s Gate”, which allows us to understand at a qualitatively new level its structure and place in the historical development of Russian cinematography.


Author(s):  
Anke Walter

While generic differences between different types of aetia are not as clear-cut as one might think, a more promising explanation of the differences between individual aetia is the period of literary history to which they belong. Aetia, in the specific ways in which they are narrated, are very much products of their time. They are also often told at crucial points of a narrative, and they provide privileged places for authorial self-reflection, both in terms of the larger agenda of a work and in terms of its aesthetics. Aetia are able to negotiate between different temporal frameworks, and their capacity to bridge the gap between the text and the world gives them the power to implicate the present in a very complex set of assumptions, beliefs, and convictions or exhortations for the future.


Author(s):  
Zinaida G. Stankovich ◽  

t. The article is dedicated to the late works of Yegor Letov and explores the lyrical subject’s perception of the world in which he himself and people like him will no longer exist. The topic touches on the theme of death which is clearly manifesting itself in all works of the rock poet. It reveals that Letov’s lyrical subject fixes his absence in the world turning to images of nature that remain unchanged, to elements of people’s everyday life that persist without him and to the space of artistic work the contemporary to the poet. In parallel there is the self-reflection of Letov’s lyrical subject as a people’s rock poet who values living life and does not aim for pecuniary well-being. The lyrical subject of Letov when thinking about the life that will continue after the passing of his generation realizes that the world will turn upside down and become uncomfortable and unacceptable for him. The world of a deceased person will separate from the big world and begin a centripetal movement while the reverse of return will no longer be possible. An important motive is the distortion of memory about a real person, which will inevitably occur after an individual leaves the general world. Human himself will not be able to influence his posthumous fate. However shortly before his death Letov comes to a rather optimistic conclusion that he managed to transmit to living humans an undistorted healthy element of his world vision.


Author(s):  
Barbara Stelmaszczyk

Czesław Miłosz’s poetry displays two reverberating topics which may be defined as contradictory existence and world experiences. One of those is the admiration for the beauty of the world and awe consequent upon capturing the simultaneous existence of individual entities (Amazement), whilst the other is the topic of the lack of fulfilment, torment, the feeling of lack of authenticity, blame, and shame (This).Miłosz depicted his “I” (represented by various personae), the split between individual consciousness, a strong sense of individuality, distinct from the commune of ordinary people (a strand salient in the pre-war volume Three Winters), at the same time nurturing a feeling of strong bonds with the society.The poet’s self-reflection holds for both topics, while the autobiographic discourse is orientated to the questions about the functions of the poetic language and about the status and sense of poetry, thereby addressing the self-topicality.


2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-18
Author(s):  
Roger Brooke

Interiority and any reference to an inner life have been radically deconstructed by the philosophical anthropologists, who find in the psychological constructions of the self and the theories of mental life the legacy of Descartes and Galileo. This critique is argued in some detail. However, the language of interiority is not merely an epistemological error on the part of the speaker. Psychoanalysis and psychopathology have documented the developmental significance of interiority and its absence. A phenomenological analysis of interiority, based in part on a clinical example, reveals several interrelated themes: temporal continuity; imagination; responsibility and ownership; privacy; self-reflection. Each of these themes is interpreted existentially in terms of being in the world. A critical discussion of interiority in Giegerich's work concludes the paper. It is argued paradoxically that the dialectical tension between interiority and exteriority – psyche and its grounding in events and relations to others – is a dimension within interiority itself.


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