Clothes as an Identity Sign of Personality in the novels by W. Genazino
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31861/pytlit2019.99.194Keywords:
fashion, clothing, Genazino, identification, sign, identityAbstract
The article presents the analysis of the problems of the functioning of fashion clothes in the novels by contemporary German writer Wilhelm Genazino in the communicative and socio-cultural aspects.
Since today's fashion is the subject of research on many branches of scientific knowledge, in particular, sociology, history, and cultural studies, it is also regarded as an integral aspect of contemporary and postmodern worldview, as a language, form of communication, leverage of social influence and information, it is worth noting that the functioning of clothing in the novel is considered from the standpoint of cultural literary criticism as a specific internally repeatedly differentiated interdisciplinary research program (A. Reckwits), which, according to W. Foskamp, suggests a transfer of philological competence to objects that in their organizational forms and communicative functions can be compared with linguistic texts.
It is noted that clothes serve not only a certain visual metaphor and one of the possibilities of individual expression of personality, but also plays a role of a sign of difference in the everyday life, which allows us to be “read” and “read” others, no matter how unstable and ambivalent these readings are . The study emphasizes the importance of the connection between clothing, body and identity in connection with the statement that clothing is a certain code that carries information about its carrier and opens the way to the deep structure of a human personality.
The analysis makes it possible to assert that self-representation through appearance (clothing and body) becomes one of the possibilities of awareness of one’s identity and serves to be one of the possible ways to save the traumatized identity in the conditions of the existential crisis.
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