Special issues

HERMENEUTICS OF URBAN TEXTS: LANGUAGES, NARRATIVES, DISCOURSES

The deadline for papers: until 15.05.2025.

In early 2022, guest editors Sergey Avanesov and Tigran Simyan initiated a special issue titled "The City in Text and the City as Text." This topic sparked great interest, and the submitted articles were published (2022, Issue 4 and 2023, Issue 1). Given this sustained attention, we are pleased to continue the discussion, now emphasizing the facets of interpretation and understanding.

The city, viewed through a cultural-historical lens, can be considered a dynamic cultural text that not only communicates its essence but also reflects the lives and values of its inhabitants, past and present. It reveals the meanings these people held dear, including those that resonate with us today.

Truly being in a city involves not only perceiving it as a cultural message (or cultural text) but also “reading” and understanding it, essential to experiencing the city as a cultural phenomenon rather than merely as an administratively designated space. In reading the city as a text (a hypertext, a palimpsest), we engage in a synchronic-diachronic dialogue with members of the urban community, both past and present. Furthermore, this process involves participating in the ongoing creation and transmission of the city’s meanings.

It is evident that semiosis requires a hermeneutic procedure to access the content and significance of the information conveyed through the city as text. The development of urban studies toward a profound cultural-anthropological understanding of the urban environment necessitates an investigation into the hermeneutics of meanings embedded within the city’s physical parameters and historical narratives (both real and legendary), as well as its narratives and artifacts. Reaching these urban subtexts requires mastery of special codes, which are not merely linguistic or technical (artistic, architectural, aesthetic) but cultural, enabling the connection between meanings and their representation/transmission through works of art, architectural techniques, and verbal narratives.

The planned issue (tentatively Issue 4, 2025) will address challenges related to the understanding/interpretation of the city as text.

Suggested topics of the issue include:

• Making and interpretating the meaning in urban space.

• Multimodality and heterogeneity of urban texts.

• The languages of the city.

• The image of the city in word and visual representation.

• The word as a component of the urban landscape.

• Sociolinguistics of the city: translatability and untranslatability.

• The urban text and its interpreter: reframing meanings.

Please submit articles to the issue editors by May 15.
Article length: minimum of 20,000 characters, maximum of 45,000 characters.

Issue Editors:

Sergey S. AVANESOV, Yaroslav Mudry Novgorod State University. Yaroslav the Wise Novgorod State University (Veliky Novgorod, Russia) - iskiteam@yandex.ru

Tigran S. SIMYAN, Yerevan State University (Yerevan, Armenia) - tsimyan@googlemail.com.

Suren T. ZOLYAN, I. Kant Baltic Federal University (Kaliningrad, Russia) - . I. Kant Baltic Federal University (Kaliningrad, Russia) - szolyan@kantiana.ru

Scheduled for publication - August 2023 (№ 3, 2023)

Cultural systems are dynamic and capable of restructuring and interaction. It necessitates addressing the process of mutual accommodation, in which various systems adapt and transform through their interactions. The cultural system is seen as the one where information (primarily linguistic information) circulates according to certain rules. The cultural system is capable of self-organization, restructuring and change. The concept of accommodation of cultural systems assumes that when in contact, cultural systems partially become similar to one another or, on the contrary, develop additional distinctive features. This results from the fact that cultural systems can reorganize and adjust to external influence. At the same time, any cultural system employs language. The study of the mechanisms of linguistic accommodation of cultural systems makes it possible to describe the dynamics of their mutual restructuring and subsequent self-organization. One of the most frequent examples of cultural accommodation is translation. But if the possibility of translation is obvious, the opposite case - non-translation - is of interest. For some reason, there are elements of cultural systems that are not subject to accommodation and should avoid it.

This issue of SLOVO will address the following problem areas:

• Non-translation caused by a variety of reasons - censorship, sacred texts, cultural differences, etc.

• The myth of untranslatability of certain texts as a reason for refusing to translate them: the myth of untranslatability of poetry and some sacred texts;

• Multilingualism and translation; 

• Non-translation from closely related languages;

• Traditional ways of non-translation of some elements of the text: epigraphs, direct speech, terms, surnames, titles, etc.

• Non-translation and commentary; should each case of non-translation be provided with a comment?

• Non-translation in music, opera and modern songs;

• Non-translation in cinematography;

• Non-translation in a philosophical text.

Guest editors: N. M. Azarova, S. Yu. Bochaver, K. M. Korchagin

Papers are to be submitted through the online submission system on the journal website https://journals.kantiana.ru/submit/

For any further information, please contact szolyan@kantiana.ru (Suren Tigranovich Zolyan)