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Файл:From a word to an idea. Part 1. Учебное пособие
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3. Building up to the last phase of the action, called climax, when the
intensity is at its highest.
4. The rising tension, leading to the climax is generally followed by a
descending movement (the anti-climax), producing a release of feeling.
5. Through syntax: short sentences, asyndeton [8].
The category of the comic in the text. The prevailing mood (tone, slant) of
the story may be not only tense but lyrical, dramatic, tragic, optimistic, pessimistic,
melodramatic, sentimental, unemotional/emotional, pathetic, dry and matter-of-fact,
gloomy, bitter, sarcastic, cheerful, etc.
We will discuss the way comic and tragic types of mood are created in a
literary text.
Any incident, situation, behavior, gesture, word or phrase, anything that
provokes laughter may be called comic.
There are many forms of the comic, many theories to explain the causes of
laughter:
1. Laughter springs from our feelings of superiority over people less
fortunate, or adaptable, or intelligent than ourselves.
2. Laughter serves the social purpose of criticizing unsocial behavior.
3. Lack of flexibility, lack of moral suppleness and certain rigidity is
ridiculous.
Comical effects are often produced by associating incongruous elements that
contrast with each other:
People who are totally different physically and mentally (Don Quixote
and Sancho Panza);
Words and expressions belonging to different levels of language or
words pronounced in a situation in which other types of words are expected (“My
children, my defrauded, swindled infants!”).
Parody is a form of the comic. The most extreme forms of parody are the
mock-heroic and the burlesque. If you describe low incidents, trivial events in
noble, high-sounding terms you use a mock-heroic style. If, on the other hand, you
make heroes (kings, princes, etc.) speak like ruffians, the effect is burlesque. In both
cases a comic effect is produced by the discrepancy between manner and matter [8].
The word humour may have a broad or a restricted sense. It is a special
aspect of the comic. Other notions or categories like wit, irony or satire generally
imply different attitudes and methods. If the playwright makes use of comic devices
placing his characters in embarrassing or ridiculous situations, this type of laughter
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is seldom humorous. It is too direct, too explicit, too obvious and too mechanical to
be called humour. It is farce.
The humorist uses an indirect method. He generally pretends to be serious,
unmoved, unconcerned. Unlike the satirist, the humorist does not take sides openly.
He does not condemn or pass judgment based on explicit or implicit moral
standards. He is imbued with a sense of the relativity of things.
Irony describes the ideal while pretending it is the real. Humour describes
the real while pretending it is ideal. Hence the humorist is interested in reality. The
humorist is a realist; an observer of life but his presentation of reality is often
fanciful, original, unexpected, paradoxical, or illogical [8].
The ironist is often more derisive, more biting than the humorist. Irony, as a
rhetorical device, is often used to denounce stupidity, hypocrisy or dishonesty. It
may aim at provoking scorn, indignation, or outrage. The ironist is supposed to be
less lenient, more involved emotionally [8].
E.g.: “What a noble illustration of the tender laws of this favored country –
they let the paupers go to sleep!” (Ch. Dickens)
Irony can be gentle, melancholy, extravagant, fanciful, bitter, sarcastic, dry,
cynical, ruthless, biting, shattering, devastating, etc…
In the extract given below which is taken from Ch. Dickens’s “Dombey and
Son” irony is created by a convergence of stylistic devices: anaphora, syntactical
parallelism in combination with antithesis and personification.
“Dombey was about eight-and-forty years of age.
Son about eight-and-forty minutes.
Dombey was rather bald, rather red, and though a handsome well-made man,
too stern and pompous in appearance, to be prepossessing.
Son was very bald, and very red, and though (of course) an undeniably fine
infant, somewhat crushed and spotty in his general effect, as yet.”
Wit is felt to be more intellectual, more brilliant, but less genial and less
restrained than humour: “When a man teaches something he does not know to
somebody else who has no aptitude for it, and gives him a certificate of proficiency,
the latter has completed the education of a gentleman”.
The category of the tragic in the text. Tragedy relates the downfall of a
character enjoying high prestige, and possessing most desirable attributes. The
tragic hero is seldom a pattern of virtue, but he cannot be a villain, otherwise he
would not arouse pity, which is a basic tragic emotion [8].
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In Greek tragedy, man was the victim of a blind, inescapable fate (e.g.
Oedipus). In both French and Elizabethan tragedies, the conflict often sprang from a
clash between passion and reason (or duty). When the hero succeeded in mastering
his passions, in preserving his integrity and his grandeur, he elicited admiration
from the spectators (e.g. Hamlet); when, on the contrary, passion was the victor (allconquering and devastating), fear was experienced by the spectator.
Now gods and monarchs have disappeared from the modern stage, and anti-
heroes have displaced heroes. The tragic is less apparent and not easily detectable in
modern literature than it was in the great classical works.
The classical idea of the fall has disappeared, but tragic elements are based on
the discrepancy between the ideal, the aim the character has set himself, on the one
hand, and the futility of human experience on the other. In some modern works, the
hero is aware of the absurdity of the world, but nevertheless puts up a brave and
gratuitous fight which gives him certain nobility (cf. “The Old Man and the Sea” by
Ernest Hemingway) [8].
Pathos – the quality in a work, which evokes sympathy, pity or sorrow.
Pathos is generally caused by characters that act, struggle, and are to some
extent responsible for their sufferings.
Modern English and American writers generally keep clear of sentimentality
and grandiloquence. Reticence, economy of means is the hallmarks of many modern
writers. E. Hemingway often leaves his reader to fill in the gaps in his prose, but
while doing so, he still succeeds in rousing the reader’s emotions [8].
Tragic elements are caused by
loneliness;
the failure to communicate;
emotional isolation;
alienation of characters in modern novels. They are trapped in a hostile
world.
The modern hero often rebels. Revolt will vary in degrees and assume many
forms. It is doomed to failure most of the time, and carries tragic overtone: failure,
anxiety or despair which are implied under the bright surface of some sophisticated
modern novels.
In modern fiction a deep sense of the tragic may be in the plot, in various
techniques of expressionism, in the atmosphere of bitterness or despair [8].
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3.4.2 Practical tasks
Task 1. Read the following extracts, define the kind of atmosphere which
is peculiar for each one and state the way the setting creates it. Pay attention to
the colours, descriptions of nature, stylistic devices which create a certain
effect.
Extract 1.
The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a
full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly
green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post
office and the bank, around ten o'clock; in some towns there were so many people
that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th, but in this village,
where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than
two hours, so it could begin at ten o'clock in the morning and still be through in time
to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.
(from “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson)
Extract 2.
He was the son of Mrs. Al Robinson who once owned a farm on a side road
leading off Trunion Pike, east of Winesburg and two miles beyond the town limits.
The farm-house was painted brown and the blinds to all of the windows facing the
road were kept closed. In the road before the house a flock of chickens,
accompanied by two guinea hens, lay in the deep dust. Enoch lived in the house
with his mother in those days and when he was a young boy went to school at the
Winesburg High School. Old citizens remembered him as a quiet, smiling youth
inclined to silence. He walked in the middle of the road when he came into town and
sometimes read a book. Drivers of teams had to shout and swear to make him
realize where he was so that he would turn out of the beaten track and let them pass.
(from “Loneliness” by Sherwood Anderson)
Extract 3.
As he entered the dark hall that led to the consulting-room a man cannoned
against him. Dick saw the face as it hurried out into the street.
"That's the writer-type. He has the same modelling of the forehead as Torp.
He looks very sick. Probably heard something he didn't like."
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Even as he thought, a great fear came upon Dick, a fear that made him hold
his breath as he walked into the oculist's waiting-room, with the heavy carved
furniture, the dark-green paper, and the sober-hued prints on the wall. He recognised
a reproduction of one of his own sketches.
(from “The Light That Failed” by R. Kipling)
Task 2. Read the extract from a letter written by Charles Lamb in
London to William Wordsworth in the Lakes, January 1801 and do the
following assignments for analysis and discussion:
1. What is it that attracts Lamb to London?
2. With what does Lamb contrasts his love for London?
3. Account for Lamb's likening London to a masquerade and a pantomime.
4. Speak of William Wordsworth's tastes and ideals. Why is he known as one
of the Lake Poets?
5. Analyse the period beginning with «The lighted shops of...». What is its
most arresting peculiarity? How is the monotony of the long enumeration broken up?
6. Point out the elements of the enumeration that express Lamb's individual
tastes, interests or feelings.
7. Render in your own words the phrases: " to have lent great portions of my
heart with usury to such scenes'", " the spurious engendering of poetry and books", "
the Mind will make friends of anything'".
8. To what does Lamb compare his book-case? Comment upon this simile.
Why is it so expressive?
9. Explain the expression "dead nature".
10. To what does Lamb compare natural phenomena?
11. Observe the subjective choice of the epithets "fresh and green and warm"
in the concluding paragraph. Can it be termed paradoxical?
12. What is the paradox at the bottom of the whole passage?
THE DEVOTEE
Charles Lamb
I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense
local attachments, as any of your mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The
lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the innumerable trades, tradesmen and
customers, coaches, wagons, playhouses, all the bustle and wickedness round about
Covent Garden, the very women of the Town, the Watchmen, drunken scenes,
rattles, - life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night, the impossibility of being
dull in Fleet Street, the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the Sun shining upon houses
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and pavements, the print shops, the old book stalls, parsons cheapening books,
coffee houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes. London itself a
pantomime and a masquerade, - all these things work themselves into my mind and
feed me without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into
night walks about her crowded streets and I often shed tears in the motley Strand
from fullness of joy at so much life.
All these emotions must be strange to you. So are you rural emotions to me.
But consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent great portions
of my heart with usury to such scenes?
My attachments are all local, purely local. I have no passion (or have had none
since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering of poetry and books)
for groves and valleys. The rooms where I was born, the furniture which has been
before my eyes all my life, a book-case which has followed me about (like a faithful
dog, only exceeding him in knowledge ) wherever I have moved – old chairs, old
tables, streets, squares, where I have sunned myself, my old school, – these are my
mistresses. Have I not enough, without your mountains? I do not envy you. I should
pity you. Did I not know that the Mind will make friends of anything? Your sun and
moon and skies and hills and lakes affect me no more, or scarcely come to me in
more venerable characters, than as a gilded room with tapestry and tapers, where I
might live with handsome visible objects. I consider the clouds above me but as a
roof, beautifully painted but unable to satisfy the mind, and at last, like the pictures
of the apartment of a connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a pleasure. So
fading upon me, from disuse, have been the Beauties of Nature, as they have been
confinedly called; so ever fresh and green and warm are the inventions of men and
assemblies of men in this great city.
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16
4 Unit 4. Word-imagery. Expressiveness of vocabulary
4.1 An Outline
The role of foregrounding in a literary work. As long as the principal aim
of creating a literary work is to reflect the author’s vision of the world, the role of a
word increases, as it obtains a contextual meaning, as a result a literary text acquires
an additional meaning and emotional colouring [5].
The ability of a verbal element to obtain extra significance, to say more in a
definite context is called foregrounding16. The notion itself was suggested by the
scholars of the Prague linguistic circle that was founded in 1926 and existed until
early 50s. Among its members were some of the most outstanding linguists of the
20th century, such as N. S. Trubetskoy, S. O. Kartsevsky, R. Jacobson, V.
Matezius, B.Trnka, J.Vachek, V. Skalichka.
A contextually foregrounded element carries more information than when
taken in isolation, so it is possible to say that in context it is loaded with basic
information inherently belonging to it, plus the acquired, adherent, additional information. It is this latter that is mainly responsible for the well-known fact that a
sentence means always more than the sum total of the meanings of its componentwords, or a text means more than the sum of its sentences [4].
Foregrounding means a specific role that some language items play in a
certain context when the reader's attention cannot but be drawn to them. In a literary
text such items become stylistically marked features that build up its stylistic
function.
Descriptive, statistical, distributional and other kinds of linguistic analysis
show that there are certain modes of language use an arrangement to achieve the
effect of foregrounding. It may be based on various types of deviation or
redundancy or unexpected combination of language units, etc. Prof. Arnold points
актуализация
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out that sometimes the effect of foregrounding can be achieved in a peculiar way by
the very absence of any expressive or distinctive features precisely because they are
expected in certain types of texts, e. g. the absence of rhythmical arrangement in
verse [4].
Thus foregrounding of a linguistic unit is possible only within a specially
organized context. One of the most frequently used principles is a principle of
recurrence. Units of all linguistic levels take part in foregrounding. On the phonetic
level units are foregrounded in alliteration, assonance, rhythm and other stylistic
means. On the morphemic level – in new morpheme-combinations and their
recurrence. On the lexical level there are plenty of devices which create new images
in a text [4].
Foregrounding through stylistic devices. In linguistics special means by
which a writer obtains his effect are called stylistic devices. A stylistic device is a
conscious and intentional intensification of some typical structural and/or semantic
property of a language unit (neutral or expressive) promoted to a generalised status
and thus becoming a generative model [9]. A stylistic device combines some general
semantic meaning with a certain linguistic form resulting in stylistic effect. It is like
an algorithm employed for an expressive purpose.
For example, the interplay, interaction or clash of the dictionary and
contextual meanings of words will bring about such stylistic devices as metaphor,
metonymy or irony.
Here is a brief outline of the main stylistic devices which make use of
different meanings of a word.
Metaphor is transference of names based on the associated likeness between
two objects. So similarity between real objects or phenomena finds its reflection in
the semantic structures of words denoting them: both words possess at least one
common semantic component. Images created by metaphors are very vivid,
especially if the metaphors are fresh [6].
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E.g. And the skirts! What a sight were those skirts! They were nothing but
vast decorated pyramids; on the summit of each was stuck the upper half of a
princess.
Personification is the type of metaphor based on transference from the
qualities of animate objects to inanimate ones: “The bare old elm trees wrung their
many hands in the bleak wintry air…”
Metonymy is based on contiguity (nearness) of objects or phenomena.
Transference of names in metonymy does not involve a necessity for two different
words to have a common component in their semantic structures, as is the case with
metaphor, but proceeds from the fact that two objects (phenomena) have common
grounds of existence in reality [6].
E.g. Some remarkable pictures in this room, gentlemen. A Holbein, two
VanDycks and if I am not mistaken, a Velasquez.
Metonymy has a strictly delineated character. Types of relations used in
transference of names are limited, concrete and often repeated:
1. Between the symbol and the thing it denotes: crown, scepter.
2. In the relations between the instrument and the action performed with this
instrument: His pen is rather sharp.
3. In the relation between the container and the thing it contains: He drank
one more cup.
4. The concrete is put for the abstract: It was a representative gathering
(science, politics).
That’s why metonymy loses its freshness and originality. But one kind of
metonymy that is more expressive is synecdoche which is based on the relations
between the part and the whole.
E.g. She saw around her clustered about the white tables, multitudes of
violently red lips, powdered cheeks, cold, hard eyes, self-possessed arrogant faces,
and insolent bosoms.
Irony is a stylistic device also based on the simultaneous realization of two
logical meanings – dictionary and contextual, but the two meanings are in
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opposition to each other. The literal meaning is the opposite of the intended
meaning. Irony is based on the opposition of what is said to what is meant [7].
E.g. "She's a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud and
if she has washed her hair since Coolidge's second term, I'll eat my spare tire, rim
and all."
There is a group of devices called play on words which are aimed at
achieving at a humorous effect.
Pun is a SD that is based on the simultaneous realization of two meanings of
a word or a phrase in a specially organized context that leads to misinterpretation of
one speaker's utterance, thus creating a humorous effect.
"There is only one brand of tobacco allowed here - Three nuns". None today,
none tomorrow, and none the day after".
Zeugma is a deliberate use of a word (usually a polysemantic verb) with two
or more homogeneous members which are not connected semantically. The
semantic relations with the first member are literal, and with the other – transferred.
Dora, plunging at once into privileged intimacy and into the middle of the
room.
It is difficult to draw a hard and fast distinction between zeugma and pun. The
only reliable distinguishing feature is a structural one: zeugma is the realization of
two semantically different meanings of grammatically homogeneous members with
the help of a verb which is made to refer to different subjects or objects (direct and
indirect). Pun is based on simultaneous realization of two meanings of a
polysemantic word or the usage of two homonyms in the same context.
Semantically false chain is a variety of zeugma consisting of a number of
homogeneous members, semantically disconnected, but attached to the same verb.
As a rule, it is the last member of the chain that falls out of the semantic group,
defeats our expectancy and produces a humorous effect:
“Babbitt respected bigness in anything: in mountains, jewels, muscles, wealth
of words” [6].
Violation of phraseological units occurs when the bound phraseological
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