Alienation as foreignization strategy in international and national media discourse in Russia and Germany

Abstract

-This paper focuses on different ways of the "alien" representation in the Russian and German media discourse based on essentials of cultural and discourse linguistics. Most research thus far has focused on the media text rather than on media uses and practices. With references to the political and social contexts, it will be demonstrated how the opposition "ownalien" is effectively used for supporting national consciousness and identity. The "own-alien" polarization has a variable base: on the international level -Russia vs. ideological opposite state; on the national level -authority vs. ordinary folk, locals vs. migrants etc. The analysis of Russian and German press articles over the period from 2013 to 2017 has shown that the most dominating foreignization strategy in the both media discourses is the strategy of alienation. For a more comprehensive research, the study material was broken up into two categories: a national and an international media discourses. As a result, the most popular tactics and communicative turns of the alienation strategy representation were exposed in the both media discourses, as well as the specific character of the "alien" verbalization in different cultures was described. The discourse and contrastive analysis of Russian and German newspaper texts is used as the research method.

Representation of “Other” in Russian and German Media Discourse

“…The idea of otherness is representative to sociological analyses of how majority and minority identities are built. The asymmetry in power relationships is central to the construction of otherness [5,6].…”