Tiuremno-blatnaya lirika [SEC=PERSONAL]

[John Dunn]

Thank you, Subhash, for your interesting and helpful comments.  I am sure that the notion of the 'carnivalesque' provides at least part of the answer.  What I am less sure about (and this may derive from my inedaquate understanding of Bakhtin) is the notion of affirmation: what precisely is being affirmed here?

I am also not sure about your final paragraph.  It is true that criminal structures and the armed forces everywhere, not to mention universities, public schools (in the British sense) and certain professions, all have their own slangs, and that Russian zhargon does have certain features in common with these slangs (I do sometimes wonder how Russian criminals cope now that their corporate language has entered the public domain).  Nevertheless, and in spite of my general scepticism about Russia always being 'different', it does seem to me that 'zhargon' has acquired certain cultural accretions that set it apart from slangs occurring in other cultures.  One of these, I would suggest, is that it was not just a language of association, but also one of dissociation (i.e. some people used zhargon to show not they were criminals, but that they were unSoviet).

John Dunn.

-----Original Message-----
From: Subhash.Jaireth at GA.GOV.AU
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:37:41 +1000
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Tiuremno-blatnaya lirika [SEC=PERSONAL]

Hi John,

In response to your:

And while it may be more difficult to make a case for considering zhargon to be a cultural construct, there are questions to be asked about the processes by which zhargon entered the mainstream language at the beginning of the 1990s.

I may suggest that Bakhtin's analysis of Rabelais and the carnivalesque would be very useful. One of many purposes of such songs and languages is to reverse the prescribed order and power relations and normative concepts of good or bad, decent and indecent. Through zhargon the oral beginnings of language begins to reassert itself, creating fissures and slippages. It's main purpose is to generate laughter in it's Bakhtinian  understanding i.e. laughter which is not only satirical and negative but positive and affirmative.

I think in all cultures (Western/Eastern, I personally don't like these terms) the languages of camps, prisons, army barracks is full of zhargon and it wouldn't be hard to locate examples similar to Tiuremno-blatnaya lirika in Russian, that is there isn't anything very special or specific about Russian baltnaya lirika.

Subhash


John Dunn
Honorary Research Fellow, SMLC (Slavonic Studies)
University of Glasgow, Scotland

Address:
Via Carolina Coronedi Berti 6
40137 Bologna
Italy
Tel.: +39 051/1889 8661
e-mail: J.Dunn at slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk
johnanthony.dunn at fastwebnet.it

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------