Soviet Teacher as Literary Character in the School Novel: An Attempt of the Discursive Analyses

Abstract

The aim of Kirill Maslinskii's article is to analyze the discursive background for teachers as literary characters in the Soviet school story of the post-war period. The 1.8 million words corpus for the study was compiled of the novels about school and schooling of children by 37 authors, written in the 1940s–1980s. The content of the episodes where the keywords (headmaster, deputy headmaster, teacher, female teacher) were mentioned was analyzed with the help of the probabilistic topic modeling (LDA). Topics significantly more or less common in these episodes than in the whole corpus of texts were used to characterize discursive context for the keywords. Judging by the thematic profiles, the term “female teacher” is opposed to all the rest. Meaningful contrasts distinguishing the thematic profiles of the terms are identified as the following: the discourse of the upbringing and everyday schooling, Komsomol and pioneers, emotions, and gender.   Keywords: school novel, discursive background, LDA, female teacher, thematic profile