Authors

Анна Соломоновская¹;  ¹ Novosibirsk State University, Russian Federation

Discussion

The paper presents the two terms and related research areas in the Western and Russian scholarly traditions, namely, cultural literacy and precedent phenomenon respectively. Cultural literacy, background knowledge shared by the majority in a given culture, (the term was introduced by E.D. Hirsch) is a vital mechanism of perpetuating and developing a culture. Cultural items mentioned in a general newspaper (or the internet site of a popular radio station, as in the current study) without clarification are considered to be “cultural literacy minimum” of a particular society. The Russian term that signifies a similar idea – of a certain image, quote, name or event – is ‘precedent phenomenon’. The aim of the study was to reveal and classify the phenomena (or items of cultural literacy) in the interviews and blogs of Russian intellectuals, frequent guest-speakers at Echo of Moscow radio station. About 1500 extracts from the interviews containing references to particular historical events, popular films, classical and modern literature, folklore (both traditional fairy tales and a more recent folklore genre in Russia – so called anekdot (very often with political implication) have been classified on the basis of certain criteria: a type of precedent phenomenon, its source, its function in the speech and the ways the precedent event, name, utterance and text are introduced.