Cultural Memory and Precedent Phenomena

Abstract

The paper provides a brief historical overview of the emergence and semantic enrichment of the concept of cultural memory in modern philological research, going back to the works of German historians (J. and A. Assman) and Soviet philologists (Y. M. Lotman, B. M. Gasparov and Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School). It is shown that in modern philological science it is most productive to conduct the analysis of cultural memory and its dynamics on the basis of the theory of precedent phenomena by Y. N. Karaulov. It is the study of the precedent fund of linguoculture and the intertextual thesaurus of personality that makes possible to fully reconstruct the verbal component of the cultural memory of a particular linguoculture and detect or predict the inevitable sections of the generation gap.