Syllabus
1. Introduction to Discourse Analysis (lecture)
Required reading
Reisigl, M. (2017). The Discourse-Historical Approach. In The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies. Taylor & Francis Group.
Supplementary reading
Dijk, TA van. (2014). Discourse, cognition, society. Discourse studies reader: Main currents in theory and analysis. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Wodak, R., & Forchtner, B. (Eds.). (2017). The Routledge handbook of language and politics. Taylor & Francis Group.
Hodge, R., & Kress, G. (1988). Appendix: Key Concepts in a Theory of Social Semiotics. In Social Semiotics (pp. 261–272). Cornell University Press.
Slides: PDF 2. Political discourse and the dynamics of sociocultural practices in contemporary Russia (lecture)
Supplementary reading
Sharafutdinova, G. (2021). MMM for VVP: Building the Modern Media Machine. In G. Sharafutdinova, The Red Mirror (pp. 133–149). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197502938.003.0006
Slides: PDF 3, 4. Ideological Elements of Putinist Discourse (lecture, seminar)
Required reading
Snegovaya, M., Kimmage, M., & McGlynn, J. (2023). The Ideology of Putinism: Is It Sustainable? <span style="vertical
Annotation
Why did Russia invade Ukraine? Do Russians really hate America and Europe? Who won the Cold War? Why is Putin so irrational? How is he still in power? These are some of the questions that will be discussed in this module. Of course, one can easily just google them and get some answers. These answers can be more or less right or more or less wrong. However, understanding politics is not only about answering these kinds of questions correctly. It is also about explaining how different answers emerge and what tools are used to validate them. Furthermore, it is about how those answers define the people who give them and construct the world in which they live. In other words, it is about political discourse.
In this module, the students will study the discourse of Russian politics and explore how the Russian people and the Russian political elite make sense of political reality. The main objective of the course is to provide an advanced overview of the discursive strategies, linguistic tools, and symbolic repertoires that are used in Russian politics to construct identities, legitimize and de- legitimize policies, justify and contest political decisions.
The thematic outline of the course covers a wide range of fields of political action and forms of political communication. The ambition of the course is to provide a multimodal perspective of the Russian political discourse, so it is not focused exclusively on verbal texts, but also non-verbal modes of discourse (pictures, photos, videos, performances, internet memes, etc.).
The course is mostly based on the analysis and interpretation of the texts that informed Russian politics from 1999 till the present.
After completing the course, the students
- will be familiar with the most important elements of social cognition that inform Russian politics,
- will be able to trace them in verbal and non-verbal texts from the Russian public discourse,
- will be able to make sense of those texts by relating them to relevant economic, social, and political contexts.