Dear colleagues,

Please note our special Literature and Culture Seminar to be held TODAY in our usual room at the Davis Center:


Wednesday, October 10
Literature and Culture Seminar

“Russian Mentality through the Mirror of Language”
Valentina Apresjan, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Russian State University of Humanities
1730 Cambridge Street, 3rd Floor, Room S354
4:15-6:00 pm

Valentina Apresjan, a Regional Fellow at the Davis Center and a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Russian Language in Moscow, examines Russian cultural mythology, stereotypes, and emotional and spiritual introspection through their reflection in the Russian language, seeking to reconstruct the Russian linguistic model of emotions.  Her work examines how the resulting model is related (or opposed) to  1)  stereotypes and introspection found in the Russian culture, especially literature; 2) images and stereotypes that people of other languages and cultures (in particular, Americans) have of Russian emotions and mentality ("Russian mentality in the eye of the beholder"); and 3) the corresponding linguistic model of emotions in the English language.  Her talk will also consider certain related fields of emotion studies (such as psychology, physiology, neuroscience), as they provide a valuable insight both into the similarities and differences between the linguistic model of emotions and their scientific counterpart, as well as into the basis for similarity and variation in conceptions of emotions across different languages and cultures.