The aim of the article is to show the changes that take place in new media and culture, and have an impact on the study of discourses. A structuralist paradigm, an iconic paradigm and a performative paradigm were chosen for the analysis. According to the author, these paradigms have the greatest influence on the cultural paradigm undergoing constant transformation. The most important consequence of the cultural turn is the interpretative and humanistic attitude used in media discourse research. It emphasizes the constructivist vision of cultural phenomena, cooperation and relations of various cultural practices, a departure from essentialism, narrative reading of texts, individual understanding and pragmatic use of a given text, as well as openness to numerous cultural contexts that expand its meaning.
The article explores COVID-19 related Internet memes and treats them as samples of creolized text in a study of the way ethnic and cultural peculiarities of memes are perceived by representatives of two radically different cultural paradigms: the Russians and Chinese. A survey is used as a method of the investigation. Russian and Chinese students, and visual arts experts evaluated Russian and Chinese COVID-19 memes according to several criteria concerning their content, verbal constituent element and visual characteristics. The study concluded that the social and culture-specific components mostly contribute to forming the opinion of the meme and its appreciation. Awareness of both the cultural background and the current social and nation-specific situation is required to decode a full amount of information contained in a meme. Equally important is the visual component in understanding the meme. Thus, the study contributes not only to studying event-specific memes but also broadens the scope of research on memes as a sample of visual culture.
The article deals with the phenomenology of the artistic mentality through its attribu-tive constituents and functional processes. As the attributes of the artistic mentality are the artistic phenomena: thinking, images, symbols, methods and tools, reflecting the pic-ture of the world in art. The functionality of the artistic mentality is designated within the boundaries of the cultural paradigm within which the artistic-communicative, artistic-ideological, ethnic-identifying and professional-creative functions are highlighted. The article focuses on the polymodality of artistic mentality that is manifested most clearly and characteristically in the choreographic art. The choreography is the most syn-thesized form of art among the historically ancient forms of human creativity. Selected attributes of the artistic mentality and its functions are manifested in the choreography, which gives grounds to define the essence and uniqueness of the choreo-graphic thinking, the choreographic image, the concept of the plastic-intonation charac-ter, energy of dance movement as a means of transmitting emotional information, cho-reographic-image thesaurus, and other specific artistic-mentality attributes. The specificity of artistic-mentality functions of the choreography provides intensive development of this form of art in the contemporary society as a socio-cultural space, covering all groups of the population by age, occupational, subcultural and other classi-fications. From a professional point of view the artistic mentality of choreography involves la-beling the essence of the choreographic-performing and choreographic-pedagogical mentality.
Literary history commonly grounds itself in the heritage of philosophical positivism. It is not only its predilection for facts, but also a belief that the facts themselves can provide for the contours of syntheses and concepts of major styles and genres. The era of symbolism marked the renewed interest in philosophical hermeneutics, and, consequently, the realization that empirical knowledge is structured by a ground of a-priori assumptions (the rehabilitation of “prejudice”). This ground gave rise to a series of major concepts, the best known of which are Ferdinand Saussure’s “langue” and “parole”, but there are many more of similar pairs: Viktor Shklovsky “story” (fabula) and “plot” (syuzhet), Jan Mukařovský’s “semantic gesture” and “structure”, or Yury Tynianov’s “tightness of a verse line” and “syntax”. In the field of philosophy it is Arnold Toynbee’s pair of terms “challenge” and “answer”. Husserl’s concept of “Lebenswelt” is the most important explication of this approach in philosophy.
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