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DOI: 10.15862/22FLSK226 (https://doi.org/10.15862/22FLSK226)

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Seitova A.R. [Culture-specific items as a literary sign: a functional typology of culture-specific items in the postmodern novel (based on Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time)] World of Science. Series: Sociology, Philology, Cultural Studies, 2026, Vol. 17, No. 2. Available at: https://sfk-mn.ru/PDF/22FLSK226.pdf (in Russian). DOI: 10.15862/22FLSK226

Culture-specific items as a literary sign: a functional typology of culture-specific items in the postmodern novel (based on Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time)

Seitova Alina Radikovna
Yuri Gagarin State Technical University of Saratov, Saratov, Russia
E-mail: seitova96@gmail.com
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-4533-0894
RSCI: https://elibrary.ru/author_profile.asp?id=1255544

Abstract. The article examines the functioning of culture-specific items in the 2016 novel The Noise of Time by British postmodernist writer Julian Barnes, which centers on the life of the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich. The analysis demonstrates that in a postmodern text, Soviet-era culture-specific items cease to perform exclusively a background-descriptive function and acquire additional semantic load, becoming leitmotifs, metaphors, and ironically reinterpreted symbols. This process is determined by the strategy of historiographic metafiction, which Barnes systematically employs to deconstruct the official Soviet narrative. The theoretical framework of the study draws on the linguocultural approach, the classification of culture-specific items proposed by S. Vlakhov and S. Florin, and Linda Hutcheon’s concept of historiographic metafiction. Three key groups of culture-specific items with enhanced semantic functions are identified: everyday culture-specific items as existential metaphors (cigarette brands, the image of a packed suitcase), toponyms as instruments of Soviet ideology deconstruction (the successive renamings of Saint Petersburg, the toponym «the Big House»), and daily-life culture-specific items as markers of the protagonist’s changing social status (Soviet and foreign car brands). Based on the analysis, the article proposes a functional typology of culture-specific items transformations in postmodern texts, including three types: metaphor-item, leitmotif-item, and deconstruction-item. The scholarly novelty of the study lies in applying postmodernist theoretical tools to linguocultural analysis, allowing culture-specific items to be treated not only as culturally marked units but also as literary semiotic signs. The study demonstrates that the linguocultural and literary-critical approaches to postmodern text are methodologically complementary.

Keywords: the Noise of Time; culture-specific items; postmodern novel; historiographic metafiction; Julian Barnes; Soviet realia; literary sign

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