Structure and content features of the narrative in media texts about the Great Patriotic War
The article presents the results of a study of the features of texts of Kemerovo Oblast's regional mass media about the Great Patriotic War in the journalistic discourse of the beginning of the 21st century. The object of the study is texts of publications in the newspapers of Kemerovo Oblast (n = 74) for 2018-2022. Media texts are used to represent a social group - people who survived the events of the war, and the features of the war situation that exist in the minds of these people in the present - 70 years after the immediate events. The research method is narrative discourse analysis. When constructing a model of the object of study, the author relies on works by Gerard Genette and Algirdas Greimas. The narrative structure is a model of the hero's memories and at the same time a model of a journalistic text that constructs reality for the reader. The analysis of media texts made it possible to identify differences in narratives in the description of the Great Patriotic War: a personal story of the hero, a retelling of the hero's story by a journalist, a story about the hero by his/her relatives. The level of narration in texts is understood as a strategy for structuring an event series. Strategies for structuring events in texts are similar, which allows speaking about the genre and style unity of the texts. The subjects of the narratives are direct eyewitnesses of the events, the objects are service to the Motherland, protection from enemies, survival. The driving force behind the stories is the events of the war. The reward of the subjects is the social recognition by society of the actions of the heroes. Obstacles to the actions of the characters in the texts show the consequences of the war (destruction, famine, captivity), worries and fear of an uncertain future, the state that interferes with people's daily lives. The space of the narrative is mobile, people move around the country. Time moves simultaneously with the events of the characters' lives. The deep structure of media texts about the war showed the presence of universal positive and negative values, broadcast through the eyewitnesses' memories. It is important that the evaluations of events and the values of the heroes are presented from the standpoint of the modern picture of the world. The narrative approach to the analysis of the texts made it possible to identify the ideological attitudes in the description of the past that exist in the public mind and are reflected in the eyewitnesses' memories. The study showed that the regional media of Kemerovo Oblast have a certain canon for describing the Great Patriotic War: subjectivism in the perception of the world, individualism in description, attention to detail, naturalism, and emotionality in description.
Keywords
Great Patriotic War, media text, Kuzbass media, narrative, discourse analysisAuthors
Name | Organization | |
Demchuk Natalia V. | Kuzbass Humanitarian Pedagogical Institute of Kemerovo State University | pyzas@mail.ru |
References

Structure and content features of the narrative in media texts about the Great Patriotic War | Voprosy zhurnalistiki – Russian Journal of Media Studies. 2023. № 13. DOI: 10.17223/26188422/13/6