Retranslation of Heroic Discourse in Ukrainian Children’s Picturebooks about War
Speaker: Dr Nadiia Akulova, BASEES Ukrainian Scholar at Risk
The children’s picturebook is a socially determined part of visual culture. Being a product of a specific historical time and cultural space, it cannot avoid such influences. Everyday visual practices and social myths are a potential source of verbal and visual senses in the children's picturebook. Thus, its iconotext can indicate the cultural meanings. By focusing on the children's picturebook as a socio-culturally constructed visual text, this presentation explores the features of retranslation of heroic discourse in Ukrainian children's picturebooks about war, which were created in 2022. The major research question is what messages – social myths and values of culture, as well as concepts of identity – do they transmit? It also focuses on how the process of the meaning construction takes place, and the ways the intracultural transfer of ideas is regulated, considering the young reader’s perspective.
Speaker
Nadiia Akulova is Associate Professor at the Department of Ukrainian and Foreign Literature at Bogdan Khmelnitsky Melitopol State Pedagogical University. She defended her PhD at V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University in 2010. Her research examined the particularities of the semantics and poetics of Mykhailo Ivchenko’s prose works through the aesthetic paradigm of Impressionism. Her current project focuses on wartime visual practices and how they are reflected in contemporary Ukrainian fiction. Her research has been supported by the Fellowship within the Slavonic and East European Studies category via the Royal Historical Society (RHS), British Association for Slavonic and Eastern European Studies (BASEES), Ecclesiastical History Society (EHS) and German History Society (GHS) Scholars at Risk Programme. She is currently a Visiting Fellow at the School of Modern Languages and CRSCEES at the University of St Andrews.