This thesis addresses verbal and non-verbal aspects of Russian identity, namely word order and smiling. It aims at investigating whether Russian national identity is shifting and can be qualified...Show moreThis thesis addresses verbal and non-verbal aspects of Russian identity, namely word order and smiling. It aims at investigating whether Russian national identity is shifting and can be qualified as ‘Western’. In order to examine these aspects, the Matched Guise Test was used, which proved its efficiency in measuring verbal and non-verbal sociolinguistic aspects that existed in a particular language community. For this experiment, native Russian speakers (n=22) were offered to participate in two tests that focused on common and uncommon word order use and use of a sincere smile in a situation where it was not commonly used. In the first task, native Russian speakers were asked to evaluate two equivalent Russian phrases produced by a guise. The phrases were different in their word order. During the second task, a video scene was shown to participants where a stranger smiled sincerely when making eye contact with another stranger. Participants were supposed to assess both tasks across seven characteristics on Likert scales. The results of the first task were compared and correlated with gender and age, as were the findings of the second task. Overall, participants pointed out that uncommon word order and a genuine smile to a stranger could not be regarded as a Russian way of verbal and non-verbal behaviour. This led to the conclusion that participants were sensitive towards these aspects. Also, their responses supported the idea that both aspects contributed to Russian identity formation. Apart from that, the study revealed that female participants were more conservative concerning uncommon word order use, and younger participants were more sensitive towards the sincerity of a smile received from a stranger. However, according to previous research, more studies are needed in order to outline a clear-cut sociolinguistic situation in Russia, especially in measuring attitudes of its population by means of the matched-guise technique.Show less
Research master thesis | Latin American Studies (research) (MA)
open access
This thesis analyses in what sense the culinary archive la biblioteca básica de las cocinas tradicionales colombianas [the basic library of traditional Colombian cuisine], that was erected in 2012...Show moreThis thesis analyses in what sense the culinary archive la biblioteca básica de las cocinas tradicionales colombianas [the basic library of traditional Colombian cuisine], that was erected in 2012 by the Ministry of Culture, contributes to the construction of the national identity. It evaluates the incentive behind the message of diversity and equality that is claimed to be conveyed by the archive, methodized by food genealogy and presents a menu of recipes that are subject to deconstruction. The shifting representations of the selected food practices with indigenous origins that have been subject to globalization are traced within four major historical periods and their associated dynamics: the precolonial period (original formation), the colonial era (reformation), the Republic (nationalisation), and eventually contemporary time (gentrification). Additionally, it illustrates the flaws of substantiation of the written mission of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs by placing the archive into dialogue with the hinterland of the recipes’ foodways, illustrating the dangerously fine line between gastronomic multiculturalism and culinary colonialism.Show less
This thesis examines the tradition of the Great American Novel (GAN). Against current academic trends, this literary canon is not understood to safeguard conservative hegemonies. Here, it is rather...Show moreThis thesis examines the tradition of the Great American Novel (GAN). Against current academic trends, this literary canon is not understood to safeguard conservative hegemonies. Here, it is rather studied as an ongoing discourse that has questioned ostensible certainties in American national identity throughout the twentieth century. A select number of GANs are shown to have survived in the canon for decades, and to share an even more select number of archetypes which the novels consistently problematise. The continued resonance of these narratives is argued to be indicative of inherent ambiguities that fester on in American identity as cultural unfinished business. An added relevance is the fact that those uncertainties cropped up precisely during periods when US nationalism seemed to peak, a pattern that forms a surprising, alternative cultural history. The term “Great American Novel” was coined in 1868 by John William DeForest, who called for realist American novels to equal European ones, and to present an imagined US community that overcame post-Civil War regional divisions. Ever since, the tradition has been alluring to American authors seeking to establish their cultural weight. Yet the canon as we know it today only took shape after the confidence-boosting outcome of the First World War, when critics and academics renounced the European, realist ideals of their predecessors in favour of “Romance”, a symbolical style which they claimed had always been the basis of literary American exceptionalism. Retroactively, The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn were canonised as the Romance-edifice, as if they had always been just that. Their archetypes, namely individualism, the American Dream and the frontier spirit, together became a national mythology of sorts, so successful was this invented tradition. Soon it was so familiar, that subsequent authors who sought to reflect on American identity could do so by alluding to those three ultimate GANs. The canon thus became an ongoing discourse, a cultural conversation in which a limited set of rules and clichés were contemplated as national roots. Authors from the Great Depression were the first to demonstrate this. They took the three tropes mentioned, and superimposed them onto topical stories of economic hardship. GANs from the era thus romanticised the canonical archetypes as the eternal foundations of American exceptionalism, precisely by linking their betrayal to contemporary, “un-American” injustices. The years following the Second World War, by contrast, saw such a boost to national confidence that they were named a “Golden Age.” Yet a new generation of authors showed its teeth by digging up GAN-archetypes and weaponizing them, especially those related to frontier-adventurism, against contemporary ideals of dull material comfort. Indeed, the canon’s role as underminer of cultural certainties became fixed in these years. Hence the nadir in GAN-output amid the blows to American superiority of the 1960s and 1970s: the eras of Vietnam and Watergate required no reminding of American problems. The Reaganist 1980s did, however. Especially black authors began to attack Americans’ sense of innocence regarding their history, by again returning to the GANs’ archetypes: taken as the roots of US exceptionalism, they were rewritten as shared traumas. Far from weakening the canon’s position, this attack on its traditions actually revitalised its function as ongoing discourse. Consequently, the 1990s saw more (critically acclaimed) GAN-attempts than any other decade. Within them, authors indicated how the end of the Cold War not only boosted American exceptionalism, but also left it without a signifying Other, and thus without direction and narrative. Again, cultural confidence in the wake of a victory in a major global conflict was being undermined by GANs’ exposing hidden ambivalences in national mythology. The GAN’s imagined community has always destabilised American certainties. The canon forms a surprising, alternative cultural history, in which anxieties invisible in other histories come to the fore, precisely when one would least expect them to. Understanding canons as mere conservative bastions is thus argued to be highly reductive, and damaging to their rich analytical promise in cultural analysis. NB: Dubbelscriptie t.b.v. de opleidingen MA Literary Studies en MA GeschiedenisShow less
