The Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies, University of Nottingham, invites you to a guest lecture by Michael S. Gorham, University of Florida
Anyone who has been paying close attention to Russian politics over the past two years can attest to the heightened attention devoted to public language and the internet as sources of verbal, cultural, and political contamination. According to one policy watch group, in just the past six months, some 20 different pieces of draft legislation have been introduced to restrict, control, monitor, or otherwise regulate the Russian-language internet (Runet). This talk examines how and why commonly held attitudes toward language help shape the perception of degradation, pollution, anarchy and all-permissiveness, beginning with the phenomenon of “scumbag language” (iazyk padonkov) and extending to Putin’s recently embraced civilizational discourse. This perception, in turn, has made Russian internet culture vulnerable to symbolic associations with all sorts of taboo or otherwise socially unacceptable behavior (ranging from cursing to treason, with slander, blasphemy, extremism, and paedophilia somewhere along that spectrum) and has thus provided rhetorical justification for regulating, reigning in, repatriating, and ultimately censoring Runet-based civil discourse.
All welcome, admission free. For further details please contact Ekaterina Chown.
Michael S. Gorham is Associate Professor of Russian in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Florida. He is a world-recognized specialist in the history of Russian Soviet and post-Soviet language aesthetics. He is the author of a wide range of works on the Russian rhetoric and speech culture, political discourse and the media language, including his seminal work Speaking in Soviet Tongues: Language, Culture and the Politics of Voice in Revolutionary Russia (2003) as well as his most recent insightful analysis of the language of the contemporary Russian politics and media, After Newspeak: Language Culture and Politics in Russia from Gorbachev to Putin (2014). Michael is also a co-editor of Digital Russia: The Language, Culture and Politics of the New Media Communication (2014). His current project is focused on the language of the Russian Internet and Digital Media and their impact on Russian politics and civil communication in general.