PhD in Philology, Associate Professor, Department of Foreign Literature, Institute of Philology and Journalism, Lobachevsky State University, Rus-sia, Nizhny Novgorod, kulikov@flf.unn.ru
Using the case of the novel The Searcher by the modern American-Irish writer Tana French, the paper explores the history of intercultural contacts and relationships between representatives of the Irish and American nations, which formed a stereo-typical perception of a foreign cultural personality in the present. It identifies the key features of the national-cultural identity of Ireland and the United States, repre-sented in the novel, and presents their comparison and opposition from the point of view of the category of the other. The paper appeals to the philosophical and socio-logical understanding of the categories of cruelty and violence and analyzes their functioning in a detective novel. Finally, it considers the author's strategy of appeal-ing to the national-cultural codes of ‘Irish’ and ‘American’, equally important for the writer, and concludes that she deliberately deconstructs binary oppositions, which is consistent with the modern state of culture, and explains the behavior of the characters both by their origin and mentality, and by the nature of man per se, whilst refusing to explicitly express the author's assessment of the events taking place in the novel.
otherness; category of the other; national-cultural code; identity; cross-cultural interaction; Tana French.
Download textFor citing: Kulikov E.A. (2025) Representation of ‘otherness’ in the aspect of national-cultural codes in the novel The Searcher by T. French. Humanitarian aspects. Moscow. INION RAN. Vol. 1 (61). pp. 120-138. DOI: 10.31249/chel/2025.01.09