The Development of Positive Attributes of Character: On the Embodiment of Specificity, Holism, and Self-System Processes

Positive character involves a system of mutually beneficial relations between individual and context that coherently vary across ontogenetic time and enable individuals to engage the social world as moral agents. We present ideas about the development of positive character attributes using three constructs associated with relational developmental systems (RDS) metatheory: the specificity of mutually beneficial individual<-->context dynamics across time and place; holistic integration of dynamic processes of an individual with both context and all cognitive, affective, and behavioral processes; and integration of the character-system with other facets of the self-system. These features of RDS-based ideas coalesce on the embodiment of positive character development. We discuss the need for more robust interrogation of embodied features of the character development system by suggesting that coaction of morphological/physiological processes with cultural processes become part of a program of the integrated individual<-->contextual processes involved in the description, explanation, and optimization of positive character attribute development. We discuss moments of programmatic research that should be involved in this interrogation and point to the potential contribution of theory-predicated research about the embodied development of positive character attributes of to enhancing the presence of moral agency and social justice in the world.

The Man in the Fairy Tale “The Three Brothers and the Golden Apple”, Retold by Angel Karaliychev

This article presents a lesson that seeks, explains and visualizes the world of fairy tales. The idea of its genesis, deeply connected with the myth, is clarified. The students' knowledge of the peculiarities of the fairy tale genre is strengthened. The problems and conflicts in the fairy tale “The Three Brothers and the Golden Apple”, specific to the folklore model of the world, are identified and compared with the personal experience of each person. The character system in the fairy tale is made meaningful through the behavior of the characters. A spatial idea of the world in the fairy tale and the way time flows in it is built, because something has happened somewhere and once.

Population Thinking and Narrative Networks: Dickens, Joyce, and The Wire

Recent approaches to literary character treat fictional population as a defining element of narrative form but continue to read novels at the level of individual characters. This essay uses the tools of narrative network analysis to bridge the gap between microlevel readings and the interpretation of the novel’s character-system as a population. Network analyses of three highly populous works—Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and David Simon’s HBO series The Wire—yield measures of social density and character centrality that show how Joyce adapted a Dickensian network plot that emerged amid the population explosion of nineteenth-century Britain to an Irish context marked by demographic decline. This adaptation of Dickens’s plot structure prepared it for a similar use in The Wire. Both Joyce and Simon use a large fictional network to periodically decenter their protagonists and undermine the typological assumptions of much realist fiction. The essay suggests that, rather than read these developments as evidence of a formal rupture between modernism and realism, we view Bleak House, Ulysses, and The Wire as playing a role in an understudied tradition of “population thinking” in the novel.

Персонажная система и мотивная структура повести Г. Башкуева «Убить время»

Introduction. Gennady Bashkuev’s works attempt to comprehend the late Soviet and post-Soviet eras, and To Kill Time proves a most significant prose work of the writer. Goals. The article seeks to identify and analyze the relationship between the system of characters in the novel and its motif structure, which helps clarify the underlying idea of the work, eclectic in structure and close in form to a short story cycle. Methods. The study rests on the theses about a relationship between semantics of motif and character, predicativity of motif, and on the concept of motif complexes and leitmotif construction of the narrative. Results. The main character of the novel is the narrator, the narrative proper divided into childhood memories and those of recent past. The characters of childhood can be clustered into three groups: family, friends, adults —motifs of happiness, celebration, romantic dreams and that of loss are associated with them. The characters of adulthood are women and childhood friends who are associated with motifs of marginal life, betrayal, guilt, and that of romance. The motifs of ‘childhood’ and ‘adulthood’ memories are intertwined, and it is the motif structure that ensures the integrity of the narrative. The key role in the novel is played by the binary image — the saleswoman Inga and the city madwoman — that combines two main themes for the narrator’s self-reflection: childhood and women. The plot structure partly fits into the universal mythological scheme: a series of trials — sketches-events from the life of the autobiographical narrator — is built into somewhat a ‘mythological journey’ to finally end with the acquisition of ‘elixir’ — catharsis and spiritual liberation. Conclusions. The image of the protagonist, the narrator, is explicated in the text and is revealed in the system of motifs associated with characters of his memories. Analysis of the character system proves instrumental in revealing key ideas of the novel and interpreting its title: those are reflections about time that become a focus of the author’s viewpoint uniting the seemingly disparate stories.

FABULA WHEEL AND PLOT MOVEMENT: HOW THE MOTIVIC COMPLEX WORKS IN A.P. CHEKHOV

The article considers the plot-forming potential of the invariant Chekhov pattern, which involves paired characters - the doctor and the investigator. Using the example of several texts ("Perpetuum mobile", "On Official Duty", "Drama on the hunt", "Investigator", "Ward No. 6"), we can see how this template works in different genre contexts (romantic novel, Christmas story, detective story) and how these contexts intersect with each other. Common to consider situational template are the motives of feeling and the vicious circle, which charged a mixed modality and intersect with the motive of theatricality, which, in turn, is associated with professional reflection, combining the figures of doctor, investigator and writer. Special attention is paid to the story "Drama on the Hunt", which is updated as a metatext, in which - against the background of the doubling of the character system - an additional semantic dimension of hunting as a narrative strategy is formed. The final texts of the group under consideration can be considered the stories "On Official Duty" and "Ward No. 6", in which a sense of duty and professional guilt is comprehended through an updated motivational complex.

UTOPIA AS AN ANTI-UTOPIA (ANDREY PLATONOV'S SHORT NOVEL BREAD AND READING)

The article analyzes A. Platonov's novel Bread and Reading, which is the first part of an unfinished trilogy called Technical Novel. Different approaches to the analysis of the writer's anti-utopian strategy are considered, and certain terms related to the intra-genre typology of his works, which are still the subject of controversy in Platonov studies, i.e., utopia, anti-utopia, metautopia, dystopia, and cacotopia are clarified. The article offers a new perspective on this problem and concludes that the short novel is characterized by a complex conflict between utopia and anti-utopia, namely, utopian consciousness is embodied in the form of anti-utopia, which leads to the ambivalence in meaning and the appearance of internal antinomies. This mainly revealed in the title of the story, the epigraph, a special type of plot situation and the character system structure. Platonov's work is characterized not only by the problem of the relationship between man and nature, but also that of between man and technology, which becomes a part of the anthropological worldview and acquires human features. Platonov's characters dream of a time when technology, nature and man are in a harmonious relationship, helping each other overcome universal entropy. The motif of construction sacrifice, traditional in the poetics of Platonov's works, plays an important role in the story: it is premature and shameful to think about personal happiness in the world of socialism that has not yet been built, without enough “bread and reading.” The work reflects Platonov's own hopes and doubts, and if the “principle of hope” (E. Bloch) is the main principle of utopian consciousness, then the writer's doubt becomes the main feature of his anti-utopia strategy. On the one hand, this makes it difficult to identify the genre of the short novel Bread and Reading (utopia or anti-utopia), on the other, it does not lead to an “imbalance” of forces, but, rather, to a meek awareness of the place of man in the world and his limited capabilities. An important role is also played by the fact that The Juvenile Sea was supposed to become the second part of the trilogy, and Dzhan may have made up the third part: the three works not only complement, but also “explain” each other. In the finale of Bread and Reading, the characters remain focused on the “distant,” as they stay in the same utopian dream space. Likely never having found a way out of the “impasse of utopia,” Platonov leaves Technical Novel unfinished.

A re-analysis of the data in Sharkey et al.’s (2021) minimalist revision reveals that BINs do not deserve names, but BOLD Systems needs a stronger commitment to open science

Halting biodiversity decline is one of the most critical challenges for humanity, but biodiversity assessment and monitoring are hampered by taxonomic impediments. We here distinguish between a “dark taxon impediment” caused by a large number of undescribed species and a “superficial description impediment” caused by species descriptions so imprecise that type specimens have to be consulted in order to resolve species identities. Recently, Sharkey et al. (2021) proposed to address the dark taxon impediment for Costa Rican braconid wasps by describing 403 species based on barcode clusters (“BINs”) computed by BOLD Systems. The default assumption of the revision is that BIN=Species (e.g., BOLD:ACM9419 becomes Bracon federicomatarritai Sharkey, sp. nov.) and therefore the diagnoses of most species consist only of a consensus barcode. We here argue that this type of “minimalist revision” is unnecessary and undesirable. It is unnecessary because barcode clusters (e.g. BINs) already provide grouping statements that overcome many of the obstacles associated with dark taxon impediments. However, minimalist revisions are also undesirable and problematic because the diagnoses are only based on one character system – that in the case of Sharkey et al. was poorly analyzed. Furthermore, the revision relies on units that violate basic rules of reproducibility because the BINs were delimited by a proprietary algorithm (RESL) that is applied to a mixture of public and private data. Here, we illustrate that many of the BINs described as species are unstable when the available public data are reanalyzed, reiterate that COI mostly measures time of divergence, and that BOLD Systems violates key principles of open science. We conclude by urging authors, reviewers, editors, and grantors to only publish and fund projects that adhere to modern standards of reproducibility.

The Clock Finger at Nought

The epigraph of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda immediately raises questions of foundation: “the make-believe of a beginning” is both the make-believe that there is a beginning and the make-believe that constitutes a beginning. It is itself the foundation that eludes it; its fiat, self-grounding and groundless. That structure enacts the topography of Eliot’s realism, which seeks to comprise a world it can also never reach. Finding in the epigraph’s sidereal clock an image both for the novel’s temporal structure (repeatedly circling back to approach its own beginning from behind, it keeps deriving its own inception) and for the groundless positing of its narrative view, it suggests that one highly abstract way to render the drama of Daniel Deronda would be to say that it involves treating questions of foundation as perspectival ones. Perspective in George Eliot—crucial to sympathy, and to her ethics and her realism—appears at the beginning of Daniel Deronda to produce character (rather than the other way around). Many of the larger movements of the novel (its character system, its narrative structure, even, at moments, its syntax) enact the sweep of the epigraph’s sidereal clock and return one, repeatedly, to its initial, initiating paradoxes of inception.

THE IMAGE OF STALIN IN M. PLISETSKAYA’S LINGUISTIC PICTURE OF THE WORLD

Введение. Моделирование языковой личности осуществляется на основе анализа разных типов текстов. Исследование языковой личности в эмотивно-оценочном дискурсе наиболее полно раскрывает эмоциональную и ценностную картину мира говорящего и его коммуникативные стратегии в эмоциональной и оценочной интерпретации действительности. Представлен анализ образа Сталина в ценностной картине мира М. Плисецкой, репрезентированной в ее мемуарном дискурсе. Цель – выявить эмотивно-оценочную лексику в экспрессивном дискурсе языковой личности и определить основные стратегии в предъявлении негативной оценки Сталина, реконструировать языковую картину мира М. Плисецкой. Материал и методы. Языковым материалом исследования послужила книга воспоминаний балерины Майи Плисецкой «Я, Майя Плисецкая», а также лексикографические источники разных типов, на фоне которых рассматривался эмотивно-оценочный словарь языковой личности: Словарь русского языка (Малый академический словарь) и Толковый словарь русского языка под редакцией Д. Н. Ушакова. Использовались общенаучные методы (наблюдения, обобщения, сопоставления, описательный метод), а также компонентный, дефиниционный, дискурсивный анализ и количественные подсчеты. Результаты и обсуждение. И. В. Сталин занимает важное место в системе персонажей книги М. Плисецкой. Сопоставление данных социологических опросов показывает, что имидж Сталина в сознании россиян улучшился за последние 15–20 лет. Статистический анализ позволил раскрыть отношение Плисецкой к Сталину: имя вождя употребляется только в связке с отрицательной эмотивной лексикой, которая усиливается за счет яркой образности выбранных лексических единиц. Эмотивно-оценочная лексика несет высокую степень экспрессивности, именно в ней находят отражение система ценностей и особенности мировоззрения языковой личности автора. Основания оценки Сталина сложны и многообразны: результаты политической деятельности, психическое состояние, морально-нравственные качества и внешность вождя. Выявлена эмотивно-оценочная лексика в тексте языковой личности, проведен сопоставительный анализ словарных толкований с контекстной семантикой автора. Заключение. В процессе описания Сталина часто употребляются бранные, просторечные слова, выражающие презрение, ненависть, возмущение и негодование, образ Сталина в картине мира М. Плисецкой оценивается крайне отрицательно. Вождь народов определяется как параноик, убийца, тиран и преступник. Если говорить о стратегиях выражения эмоций и оценок, то негативная информация вводится по-разному: кроме прямых оценочных речевых актов используются косвенные высказывания – явление энантиосемии, когда умышленно актуализируется диссонанс между положительной словарной коннотацией лексемы и отрицательным контекстом. Используются также разные фигуры речи: живые, образные метафоры, олицетворения, сарказм и ирония для выражения ненависти и презрения к Сталину. Introduction. The linguistic personality is embodied in different linguistic materials, its modeling is based on the analysis of various kinds of texts. The study of linguistic personality in the emotive-evaluative discourse reveals the emotional and value picture of the speaker’s world and his communicative strategies in the emotional and evaluative interpretation of reality. This article presents an analysis of the image of Stalin in the value world picture of M. Plisetskaya, represented in the emotional and evaluative discourse of her memoir. The aim of the work is revealing emotive-evaluative vocabulary in the emotive-evaluative discourse of our linguistic personality and determining the main strategies in presenting negative assessments of Stalin, and reconstructing M. Plisetskaya’s linguistic picture of the world. Material and methods. The linguistic material of this research is the memoir of ballerina Maya Plisetskaya «I, Maya Plisetskaya», as well as other lexicographic sources: Dictionary of Russian language (Small Academic Dictionary, MAS), Explanatory Dictionary of Russian Language, edited by D. N. Ushakov. Methods and techniques used in the work: quantitative analysis of emotive-evaluative vocabulary, contextual, definitional and discourse analyses and the method of cognitive modeling. Results and discussion. I. V. Stalin takes an important place in the character system of M. Plisetskaya’s book. Social Survey shows that the image of Stalin in the minds of Russians has improved over the past 15–20 years, in contrast to this, M. Plisetskaya in her book assesses Stalin purely negatively, the name of the leader is used only in the context of negative emotive vocabulary. Emotive-evaluative vocabulary carries a high degree of expressiveness, reflects the system of values and particularity of the worldview of the linguistic personality. Stalin was evaluated in different ways: political activity, mental state, moral and ethical qualities and appearance. Having identified emotiveevaluative vocabulary in the linguistic personality’s text, we took a comparative analysis with the contextual semantics. During our work, we found that the evaluation of Stalin in most of the cases is realized with the help of negative emotive vocabulary, the vivid expression of which forms the picture of the world of M. Plisetskaya. Conclusion. In the process of describing Stalin, abusive, vernacular words with a strong expressive coloring are often used, expressing contempt, hatred and indignation. The image of Stalin in M. Plisetskaya’s world picture is assessed extremely negatively, the leader is defined as a paranoid, murderer, tyrant and criminal. If we talk about strategies for expressing emotions and evaluations, then negative information is introduced in different ways: direct evaluative speech acts, indirect statements – the phenomenon of evaluative enantiosemia, when the dissonance between the positive dictionary connotation of the lexeme and the negative context of the text is deliberately actualized. Various figures of speech are also used: lively, figurative metaphors, personifications, sarcasm and irony to express hatred and contempt to Stalin.

The Images of Dante’s Inferno in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead

The House of the Dead was repeatedly compared with the first part of Dante’s The Divine Comedy even in F.M. Dostoevsky’s lifetime. However, his contemporaries usually focused on general analogies, while later scholars paid more attention to the narrative features or individual reminiscences. This research studies the main aspects of the artistic structure of the Dante code, constructing the space of Hell in Dostoevsky’s novel. 1. The organization of space. Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, the narrator in The House of the Dead, recreates a three-dimensional image that resembles a gradually narrowing funnel: from a bird’s-eye view, where the prison is seen in its entirety, the focus slowly descends, passing to smaller objects, and finally reaching the “three boards”, which limit Goryanchikov’s personal space. The same principle is employed to construct the space of Hell in Dante’s poem. In The House of the Dead, there is another significant indication of the spatial affinity of Dante’s hell and Dostoevsky’s katorga – active imagery associated with cobwebs and spiders. In the centre of the system of images associated with the designated semantic network is the parade- major, the head of the fortress and the owner of the inmate web. 2. The character system as an element constituting the space of Hell. The character system of The House of the Dead follows the compositional principle of Divine Comedy, where sinners are located in different circles in accordance with their main passion. There are three circles in the prison: the first is formal, according to the court decision; the second is informal, internal, formed by crafts and occupations; the third represents Goryanchikov’s perspective as an exponent of human and humane judgment, which distinguishes another person’s moral state. 3. Torment. The House of the Dead demonstrate a hierarchy in describing the tortures, while freedom becomes a fundamental category to embody the most important motif of physical and moral torment connecting Dostoevsky’s novel with Dante’s experience. The bodily torment ceases to be only the torment of the body to become a pain of the soul, comparable to physical torment, so the soul suffers and burns. Hell as a moral topos was the key for Dostoevsky. In The House of the Dead, he chooses the same way as Dante in The Divine Comedy: vivid corporeality conveys an esoteric metaphor of moral suffering and deep inner movements of the soul.