5. Текст як категорія лінгвостилістики. Основні антропоцентри художнього тексту (образ автора, образ персонажа, образ читача)

LINGUOSTYLISTICS

• Deals with the language tissue of a text;

• Centers on connotative meanings that can be derived from language means themselves;

• Focuses on identifying expressive means and stylistic devices and their interpretation.

Text

The origin of the word ‘text’ goes back to late 14 century ( Lat. textus ‘style of texture of a work’.

Text – is any sequence of words ordered according to the rules of a given language system (a semiotic approach).

Text – is any verbal communication event performed in either written or oral mode.

1. IMAGE OF THE AUTHOR

2. IMAGE OF THE CHARACTER

3. IMAGE OF THE READER

1. The image of the author (IOA) was introduced by acad V.V.Vinogradov in the mid XX century. Russian tradition - ‘image of the author’ (V.V. Vinogradov, B. Korman, M. Bakhtin); metaimage (N. Goncharova)

Western tradition - implied author – synonymic to IOA (W. Booth, Sh. Rimmon-Kenan, M. Toolan); abstract author (V. Schmid)

IOA – a concentrated embodiment of the essence of the text that draws together the entire system of linguistic structures of the characters in their correlation with the narrator or narrators, and thereby being the conceptual stylistic centre, the focus of the whole (V.V. Vinogradov)

The very term “author” is often used misleadingly to denote different things:

• author as the biographically and biologically real writer;

• author as an actor represented in the text alongside other characters;

• author as the creator of the text , as an artistic representation of the writer.

Chatman says: “Unlike the narrator, the implied reader can tell nothing. He, or better, it has no voice. It instructs us silently, through the design of the whole, with all the voices.”

A semiotic model of communication

Real Author – Implied Author – Narrator – Narratee – Implied Reader – Real Reader

Gerald Genette: voice – who speaks?; focalisation – who perceives?

A narrator – is a speaker or voice. He or she is the agent who establishes communicative contact with an addressee.

A focalizer – is an agent whose point of view orients the narrative text. External focalizer – a narrator; internal – a character.

Omniscient or unlimited NP – the implied author distances himself from the narrated events, he is above the characters, he is free to switch from one episode to another.

Limited, or concentrated NP – suggests the description from the point of view of either the narrator identified in the text and having some reference to the story, or one of the characters who, at the same time, is the narrator.

2. The image of the character. Character - any entity (individual or collective) – normally human or human-like – introduced in a work of narrative fiction. Characters are “storyworld participants”. Characters can be human, supernatural, animal or personifications of abstractions (allegorical). Characters can be fictional or based on real people.

Approaches to fictional character within the framework of modern text interpretation.

1. Hermeneutic approach: characters are dominantly representations of human beings. It is necessary to take into consideration the specific historical background of the characters and their creators.

2. Psychoanalytical – concentrates on the psyche of both characters and recipients. They aim at explaining the inner life of characters, as well as the reactions of viewers, users, readers with the help of psychodynamic models of personality (e.g. developed by Freud and Lacan).

3. Structural and semiotic approaches highlight the very difference between characters and human beings, focusing on the construction of characters and the role of (linguistic, visual, audible or audio-visual) text. They regard characters as sets of signifiers and textual constructs.

4. Cognitive theories view characters as text-based constructs of the human mind, whose analysis requires both models of understanding text and models of the human psyche.

Major classifications of literary text characters.

- Aristotle: agents/ performers; Vladimir Propp: characters as functions; Greimas: the actantial model, (based on Propp's theories): the six actants (subject, object, helper, opponent, sender, receiver) are divided into three oppositions, each of which forms an axis of the description; Chatman: characters as a set of features/properties

Major components in the structure of the image of the character: portrait, speech, actions, inner (emotional and psychological) states.

Classification of characters:

• flat/round

• static/ dynamic

• driver/passenger (character-driven novel/plot-driven novel)

• main/minor character

Methods of conveying characters: direct/indirect/reinforcement by analogy (analogous names, characters, environment).

3. Image of the reader – ghost of addressee. It is the literary text that makes its choice of the reader, suggesting a pattern of interpretation and thus constructing an image of its intended reader. Linguistic signals of addressee orientation (SAO) – patterns of interpretation, inscribed in text as codes, which affect the real audience’s perception through the creating the image of the intended reading audience.

The implied reader (model reader, reader’s image) constitutes the mediating link between the author and reader. Te narrative presence of the implied reader in literary discourse is called the narratee , the narrator’s counterpart which in text is signaled by various SAO. The communicative goal in literary discourse envisages an aesthetic response based on defamiliarization as seeing familiar things in a new light. It makes a literary discourse processing complicated, prolonged and deautomated. The response mechamism in literary communication departs from prototypical understanding, focuses on several interpretations.

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