Monument as a Cultural Text

This article explores the culture of perpetuation as a relevant practice for preserving historical and cultural heritage in contemporary urban landscapes. Issues of cultural and historical memory have become particularly relevant in today’s rapidly changing society. Monuments, as cultural texts, not only preserve historical and cultural heritage but also actively participate in shaping the modern urban environment, ensuring the continuity of generations and preserving cultural identity. The study of monuments as cultural texts is linked to changing sociocultural paradigms in diachronic dynamics, as well as to cultural aspects reflecting social, emotional, and identity processes in society. The aim of the article is to conceptualize the monument as a structural and semantic category possessing a set of attributes and characteristics inherent in cultural texts, within the context of diachronic narratology. Contextualization is becoming a crucial principle in obtaining cultural knowledge. Using monuments and memorial sites in Belarusian cities as examples, this article attempts to substantiate these forms of memory and analyzes their essence and significance in the context of the phenomenon of absence. This article examines forms of spontaneous memorialization as a sociocultural contextualization of events in contemporary culture. It provides examples of how spontaneously emerging sites of memory undergo the process of institutionalization. The novelty of this study stems from the emergence of new forms of memory, which acquire specific characteristics distinct from those of artifacts in previous historical periods. These include, monuments created using augmented reality technologies and digital projects. The intertextuality of monuments allows them to become part of contemporary culture, transforming them from historical relics into relevant components of cultural memory. This article concludes with a discussion of the prospects for further study of monuments as cultural texts, and a comprehensive understanding of the cultural context of their existence, amidst the expansion of humanities knowledge about the culture of memory and the diversity of relationships between text and culture.

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