4. Place

‘Place’ focuses on the use of place in short stories. Outside of sci-fi, short stories are not in the business of creating places. Nevertheless, there are certain places that create stories: the city of St Petersburg has spawned much urban folklore. Paris is another such place, and this can be illustrated by a set of works that can be compared in how they use that city to condition the stories of their characters and plots. Enchantment and disenchantment with Paris shape stories in which the city exercises a spell, and Paris is more like a theatre set onto which drifters, dreamers, and charmers come in all ages and social classes.

Urban Folklore, Urban Legend

Everyday talk is central to how places become stigmatized and how asymmetric borders enter the popular imagination. This chapter explores the tales about Tijuana that proliferate in neighboring San Diego, based on a set of forty-five qualitative interviews conducted in six San Diego County communities between 2006 and 2008. The analysis finds that people seldom repeated positive stories they heard, whereas they traded liberally in negative tales, many of which came from remote or untraceable sources. These latter stories constituted a kind of urban folklore that cast the neighboring city in a dark light. This tendency was much stronger among those who had little firsthand experience in Tijuana, revealing the reach and importance of an abstract bordered imaginary.

Linguosemiotic peculiarities of the text in TikTok: “the word of others” in the new multimedia reality

The subject of this research is the tendency towards formation of a new semiotic code of entertainment content, observed in the Russian segment of Tiktok social network. The goal of this research is to determine the new trends in recreational segment of the modern social network, the popularity of which depends on the number users’ likes and reposts. The research material contains the continuous sampling of videos for the period from February to March 2021. The analysis of videos of the Russian-speaking users allows revealing the tendency towards the emergence of a new type of recreational content at the intersection of plagiarism and parody. This implies voice-covering of the fragments of stand-up show in a different context: for example, a fragment from comedy show is lip-synced by a woman while preparing meal. In other words, the authors of such content do not claim to be original, they virtually lip-sync with synchronization of another person's speech (moreover, the TikTok format allows seeing the link to the original soundtrack). At the same time, such content is far from parodic, as there is no mimicking or gesturing of the original. This rather implies the renovation of the open text tradition, which historically accompanies the emergence of a new form of broadcasting information. Such content also indicates common features with the folklore: the author's story  is voice-covered by various users repeatedly, like an anecdote or the history of urban folklore. The conclusion is made on the emerging semiotic tendency of the polycode multimedia text, which on the one hand has deep historical roots, while on the other hand is substantiated by the modern technological capabilities and ways of broadcasting information.

On the Question of the Relationship of Collective and Individual Principles in the Flamenco Culture (mid-XVIII — first quarter of the XX century)

The flamenco culture, an original composition of music, poetry, dance and costume, was born in Andalusia, over time has become one of Spain’s «brands», and has now spread well beyond the Iberian Peninsula. Flamenco is full of contradictions that’s why flamenco studies and cultural studies researchers have been working on it for centuries, both in its homeland and abroad. The purpose of this article is to study the relationship between individual and collective elements in the flamenco culture and to analyze various aspects of its formation and existence basing on the literary and historical sources, works on the history of culture, in general, and flamenco, in particular. The Russian segment of flamenco studies research is dominated by works devoted to individual components of flamenco culture — dance, music, history and mythology or particular styles. At the same time, there are no works that attempt to understand the functioning of internal mechanisms and their role in the formation and development of this art. It seems relevant to conduct research from these positions, and the possibility of identifying objective patterns of interaction between the individual and the collective elements determines the scientific novelty of the proposed article. The authors come to the conclusion that, combining elements of rural and urban folklore, flamenco is a popular culture that performs a communicative function both within one social layer and between different layers of urban society. The collective and individual principles in this culture find expression at different levels of social interaction, historical ties, and interpersonal communication; they are not parallel, but interconnected and mutually intertwined. At the level of the text, the collective principle serves as a source of topics, each of which a particular author gives an individual interpretation. At the level of performance and perception, the author transmits to the listener a message containing information about the collective (the memory and experience of previous generations or the current situation for a certain part of society); shares his own experiences or assessments. The listener, perceiving information, on the one hand, joins the collective, and on the other, individualizes it by relating it to his own picture of the world. The presence of contrasts in the flamenco culture is due to the social environment of its formation and existence, the presence of a commercial component and the focus of the performer on the tastes and needs of the audience. The need to attract, surprise and interest the audience at different stages of the development of flamenco influenced all components of this art, and the competition factor encouraged performers to look for new forms and develop new styles. And in general, the presence of opposite vectors provided this culture with the potential that allowed it to go beyond the narrow social stratum, to develop and gain popularity not only in Spain, but also far beyond its borders.

Culture in the Ironic Interpretation of Modern Urban Folklore

The article describes peculiarities of culture as a complex multidimensional phenomenon in the everyday consciousness, as well as the reflection of the concept of culture in anecdotes and parody aphorisms, the comic genres of modern urban folklore. The experimental material comprised anecdotes and parodic aphorisms, including the word culture and / or its derivatives; and the analytical approach employed combined content-analysis, contextual-semantic, stylistic, comparative, and interpretive analyses. As a result, it has been shown that at the level of vocabulary, the analyzed texts reflect the structure of culture as a material, social, spiritual, and psychological phenomenon, most of all, such components as cultural subjects and psychological mechanisms of the implementation of cultural activity. At the same time, the texts reproduce all the basic meanings of the word culture, but to the greatest extent they demonstrate a definite state of social, economic, mental life in some era, among some people, class, culture along with human achievements in taming nature, in technology, education, social order. At the same time, the mixing of styles, characteristic of comic folklore, at this level makes it possible to emphasize the essential features of culture: value, normativity, subjectivity, variability. The analysis of the distribution of the themes for anecdotes and parody aphorisms, and later the analysis of the texts content within each of the selected theme groups made it possible to identify the most significant contradictions in terms of ironic everyday consciousness associated with certain aspects of culture.

TRANSFORMATION OF FOLKLORE TRADITION IN SMALL PROSE BY SERGEY SILIN

Введение. Малая проза С. Силина еще недостаточно изучена литературоведами, однако его произведения вызывают интерес среди читателей разных возрастов и могут быть отнесены к двухадресной литературе, т. е. литературе, адресованной как детям, так и взрослым. Анализ произведений писателя, использующего приемы садистских стишков, страшной истории и анекдота, способствует более глубокому осмыслению основных тенденций развития современной российской прозы для детей. Цель – выявить жанровое своеобразие малой прозы С. Силина в соотнесении с фольклорной традицией. Материал и методы. Теоретической базой исследования послужили труды фольклористов Е. М. Мелетинского, Е. Курганова, О. Н. Гречиной, М. В. Осориной и др. Материал исследования – рассказы С. Силина. Результаты и обсуждение. Проведенный анализ позволил выявить характерные особенности малой прозы С. Силина. Писатель использует приемы нескольких фольклорных жанров: легкое отношение персонажей к смерти, гротеск, парадокс, юмористическая концовка, мнимое благополучие финала. Дети и взрослые представлены носителями гипертрофированно усиленных отрицательных качеств. Малая проза писателя адресована как взрослым, так и юным читателям. Заключение. В своем творчестве С. Силин трансформирует жанры городского фольклора: страшных историй, садистских стишков, анекдотов, чтобы заострить проблемы «отцов» и «детей», дать возможность взрослым и детям увидеть друг друга со стороны. К характерным особенностям малой прозы писателя относятся: легкое отношение к смерти, отсутствие катарсиса, абсурдный финал, наделение персонажей гипертрофированными качествами (жестокость, недисциплинированность, непослушание и т. д.). Рассказы чаще всего имеют кольцевую композицию, свидетельствующую о том, что основной конфликт произведения остался неразрешенным. Важную роль играют заглавия: в них содержится основная проблема рассказа. Использование фольклорных жанров позволяет автору донести до своих читателей в привычной с детства игровой форме важные педагогические идеи, а также выявить социальные, общественные и семейные проблемы. Introduction. Sergey Silin’s small prose has not yet been sufficiently researched by literary critics, but it arouses interest among readers of different ages and can be attributed to dual addressed literature. The study of the writer using the techniques of sadistic poems, horror stories and jokes contributes to a deeper understanding of the main trends in modern Russian prose. The purpose of the article is to reveal the genre originality of small prose by Sergey Silin. Material and methods. Theoretical basis for the study were the works of folklorists E. M. Meletinsky, E. Kurganov, O. N. Grechina, M. V. Osorina and others. The research material is short stories and horror stories by S. Silin (“The Fatal Five”, “The Fatal Four”, “Don’t Drown Five Graders!”, “Sambo Lesson”). Result and discussion. The analysis revealed the characteristic features of Silin’s small prose. In his work the author transforms the techniques of urban folklore genres: scary stories, sadistic poems, jokes. Conclusion. S. Silin’s works are dually addressed: not only to children, but also to adults. In his works, the writer uses techniques typical of urban folklore genres – they reflect the cynical attitude to death which is characteristic of sadistic poems; the use of clericalism; the absence of a clear confrontation between good and evil; the division into «good» and «bad» characters; the catharsis is replaced by a humorous ending; the idea of retribution is replaced by a paradoxical ending which emphasizes the immutability of what is happening. The stories most often have a circular composition, indicating that the main conflict of the work remained unresolved.

FOLK STORIES ABOUT COVID-19 AS A PHENOMENON OF MODERN URBAN FOLKLORE

The article analyzes folk stories about COVID-19 recorded in the urban environment during March–December 2020. The authors identify different varieties of “COVID” prose (the cases from medical practice, “confessions” of the people on the way to recovery, “hypotheses” of the virus’s origin, gossips about the planned chipping, traditional recipes for “the Chinese infection”, etc.), determine their subject matter (the origin of the virus, the duration of the pandemic, methods of COVID treatment, the vaccine’s effectiveness, means of transmission, etc.); distinctive features of oral stories are also given: the content’s relevance, the responsiveness to new hypotheses and versions of the virus’s origin and treatment, the mobility of genre’s boundaries. The tales of medical workers, telling about extraordinary incidents in medical practice, combine the tragic and the comic features. Their characters are doctors, showing miracles of endurance and selflessness, and “sufferers” — patients who are worthy of respect and sympathy. Narratives existing in a vast sociocultural space are based both on personal experience and on information obtained from “official sources” (mass media, Internet, medical workers). The emergence and active development of “COVID” folklore is an indication of folklore’s dominant features to respond vividly to changes in human life and society and acts as a clear demonstration of the sustainable development of folk traditions at the present stage.

GENDER RELATIONS IN SPANISH FLAMENCO CULTURE (BASED ON THE COLLECTION OF THE COUPLETS BY A. MACHADO ALVAREZ)

The main theme of flamenco songs - urban folklore of Andalusia - is the relationship between a man and a woman. Couplets, written in the form of three or quatrains, tell about the evolution of feeling and serve as a source of information about the cultural, ideological and linguistic characteristics of the south of Spain. The authors of the couplets are representatives of an ethnoculturally heterogeneous socially vulnerable stratum of urban society. The purpose of the article is to understand the formation, existence and disintegration of the union of a man and a woman through the prism of a folk song. The material was the collection of A. Machado Alvarez, published in 1881, reflecting the manners and relationships of people of the 19th century.