Topics of Next Issues

# 1(6) 2012: Cultural Memory

The Guest-Editor of the Issue — Alexei Vasiliyev — Ph.D., Russian Institute for Cultural Research, Deputy Director of Research; Moscow Pedagogical State University, Vice-chair of the Department of Culturology, docent

A keen interest in the past, and the persistent desire to remember the past, in an attempt to recall and rethink everything that has been, accompanies every crisis period. It is no wonder, then, that the concepts of collective and social memory emerged in the critical, “seething” 1920s when French sociologist, Maurice Halbwachs, and German art historian and cultural theorist, Aby Warburg, worked out the first approaches to the study of the aspects of the collective memory.

The 20^th century brought about a “memorial boom”, opening up the “époque of commemoration”. Memory became a key concept and a weapon of political struggle. Sociologists raised the question of a re-conceptualization of sociology, as a discipline in light of the notion of social memory. In the early 1990s, Jan Assmann introduced the notion of cultural memory — an idea that may well become the central hub of a new paradigm of cultural studies.

Scholarly debates, and the language of mass media and of politicians, are loaded with reasoning about the “politics of memory”, “wars of memory”, “tyranny of redemption”, nostalgia, and amnesia. Memory studies, as a new discipline, has occupied a steady position since the 2008 SAGE publication of the journal “Memory Studies”.

Public success and demand, together with the academic recognition of memory studies have, in many ways, surpassed the self-cognition of the discipline itself.

Related topics include

• The formation of definitions of memory studies: Disciplinary challenges
• The birth of memory studies: “Founders” and “classics” and their contributions
• The ontological, epistemological, and ethical aspects of memory studies
• The concept of “cultural memory” and its structure
• Memory in culture: usage and misusage
• Memory images in the social imagination
• A diet of recollections and the elixir of forgetting in culture
• Nostalgia and cultural dynamics
• The memory apparatus: Memory studies and media studies
• Memory and conflict in culture: Ressentiment – repentance – retrospective justice
• Memory and trauma
• Memory politics: Limits of the possible and the admissible

Submissions are welcome

# 2(7) 2012: Kino|text

The Guest-Editor of the Issue — Lyubov Bugaeva — Ph.D., St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Institute for Cultural Research, Researcher, St. Petersburg State University, Faculty of Philology, Associate Professor

Nowadays, it seems that the term “kino-text” is repeatedly being used in film studies. Quite often, “kino-text” simply stands for an information message expressed through the vehicle of cinematography. However, even as early as 1927, Yury Tynyanov identified possible approaches to kino-text based on its complex and multiple-valued notion: the search for a unique “hero” of cinematography, the decomposition of film narrative into the simultaneous layers of the viewer’s perception, an analysis of the means of expressivity in films and literature, the comparison of a literary novel with a kino-novel, research into styles and genres in literature and cinema, etc.

Cinematography is the first medium to combine content(?) and text. The history of cinematography is the history of film mediality (Igor Smirnov), and hence the history of kino-text. Between film and text, a breathtaking diversity of relations exists: film and text, film versus text, text for the film, text in the film, text after the film, film as text, text as film, and finally kino-text as integrity. What then is “kino-text”? Does kino-text analysis have a distinctive character? Our goal is to clarify the notion of “kino-text”, to trace its dynamics, and to expose the “cognitive rearrangement of the world” accomplished by cinematography.

Related topics include

• Kino-text semantics, syntaxes and pragmatics
• Intertextuality and intermediality in cinematography
• Kino-text and structures of experience, cine-cogitation
• Kino-text interpretation
• Text dynamics vs. kino-text dynamics
• Narrative and kino-narrative
• Literary cinematicity
• Genres in cinema and literature
• Kino-text as a creolized text
• Kino-text translation

Submissions are welcome