Силистика в английском языке

    Character – a person in a story, the sum of his physical and spiritual qualities. Characterization is accomplished in a variety of ways. Traits may be flatly stated; characteristics may be implied by reporting the character’s sayings and deeds which demonstrate a trait; or the character’s thoughts may be revealed. The effect of the character on other personalities, plus their comments on him, furthers the delineation. A character’s actions should be consistent with his individuality and his motivations should provide the basis for the conflict.

    The degree to which a character is portrayed depends somewhat on the genre. A novelist obviously has room for a fuller development than a writer of short stories.

    Main characters are usually treated in the round, with a wealth of concrete details, while minor personages often remain flat characters who may appear as little more that a name or a dominant trait. Writers of melodrama often use character tags – repetitions mention of an identifying physical feature, speech oddity, or personally quirk.

    Conflict – the element in a plot that results from one force opposing another as, e.g., the protagonist’s efforts being thwarted by the antagonist. [Protagonist – originally the main character in a Greek play. The term now denotes the chief character in any drama or work of fiction. Antagonist – the contestant.] The changing balance of forces makes up the plot events and the resolution of this struggle is the key to reader interest. Basically there are four main categories of conflict.

1. Man against Nature  (Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki)

Man against his Environment.

2. Man against Man [most love stories, e.g. Shakespeare’s ”The Taming of the Shrew” or action stories e.g. A. Duma’s “The Three Musketeers”
3. Man against Self [stories dealing with a change of character, such as V.Hugo’s “Les Miserables.”]
4. Man against the Gods [Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex.”]

    Plot – an author’s arrangement of the events in a narrative for a planned effect, as distinguished from story or story line which retains the order in which the events occurred.

    This artificial ordering of events also includes the selection of certain detail for the sake of reader interest, for revelation of character, or for fulfillment of the author’s theme or purpose in telling a story. A plot is expected to develop out of conflict between the motivations driving its characters; the hero strives for something and is opposed by other men, by nature, or by something within himself.

    Style – is understood as an emphasis (expressive, affective or aesthetic) added to the information conveyed by the linguistic structure, without attention of meaning, which is to say that “language expresses and that style stresses, some special values are added” (M. Riffaterre)

    Genre. The word “genre” comes from French meaning “a kind” denotes a historically formed type of literary work. The genre of a literary work materializes in a set of formal features imposed upon by the content. These formal features are: composition, plot structure, imagery, speech representation, rhythm, etc. Each genre is an invariant and is represented in different variants. The type of writing characteristic of ancient Greek and Roman literature as well as that of the Renaissance and classicism periods is known as “pure genre”. Shakespeare’s great tragedies “Romeo and Juliet”, “King Lear”, etc. represent each a fatal conflict for the main hero. The action in each of these plays climbs to its culmination and ends in a catastrophe.

    In modern Literature (since the 18^th c) mixed genres are prevalent. Thus, for instance, the elevated tragedy of Shakespearean days gave way a mixture of tragedy and comedy, or tragedy and drama, etc. 
 

    Language, the Medium of Literature. Foregrounding. Expressive Potentialities of Language Units. 

    The material substance of literary texts is language. Language is capable of transmitting practically any kind of information. It has names for all things, phenomena and relations of objective reality. But besides denoting a concrete thing, action, or concept the word may carry a combination, an overtone.

    The ability of a verbal element to obtain extra significance was called by Prague linguists foregrounding: when a word (affix, sentence, etc) automatized by the long use in speech, through context developments obtains some new additional features, the act resembles a background phenomenon moving into the front line – foregrounding.

    A contextually foregrounded element carries more information that 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; thus a sentence means always more than the sum total of the meanings of its component – words, or a text means more than the sum of its sentences.

    The resources of each language level become evident in action, i.e. in speech, so the attention of the learners should be drawn to the behaviour of each language element in functioning, to its aptitude to convey various kinds of information.

    At the IX International Congress of Linguists in 1962 a well-known Belgian linguist E. Benveniste suggested the structural hierarchy of language levels. E. Benveniste’s scheme of analysis proceeds from the level of the phoneme – through the levels of the morpheme and the word to that of the sentence. Thus we differentiate the following levels of foregrounding:

    I Phono-graphical Level. Morphological Level.

    II Lexical Level

    III Syntactical Level

    Representation of the literary text in terms of a structure or a hierarchy of layers presupposes the concept of macro – and micro – elements (components)

    Macro-components of poetic structure are: theme, image, idea, composition, plot, genre, style, etc. As components of poetic structure they are essentially inseparable from each other.

    Micro-components of poetic structure are tropes and figures of speech.

    Macro-elements of a literary work are made out of micro-elements. 

 

     Lecture 3 

    Context Segmentation. 

 It distinguishes the following forms of speech acts:

    I The author’s speech:

1. narration
2. description
3. the author’s digressions

II Somebody else’s speech:

1. dialogue (with the author’s remarks)
2. quotation

III Represented speech

    A work of creative art is never homogeneous as to the types of information it carries. They very much depend on the viewpoint of the writer (the addresser), as he and his personages may offer different angles of perception of the same object. Naturally, it is the author who organizes this effect of polyphony but we, the readers, while reading the text, identify different views with various personages, (not attributing them directly to the writer). The writer’s views and emotions are most explicitly expressed in the author’s speech (or the author’s narrative). The unfolding of the plot is mainly concentrated here, personages are given characteristics, the time and the place of action are also described here, as the author sees them. The author’s narrative supplies the reader with direct information about the author’s preferences and objections, beliefs and contradictions, (i.e. it serves the major source of shaping up the author’s image).

    In contemporary prose, the writer entrusts some fictitious character (who might also participate in the narrated events) with the task of story-telling. He does it in an effort (1) to make his writing more plausible, (2) to impress the reader with the authenticity of the described events, etc. The writer himself thus hides behind the figure of the narrator, presents all the events of the story from the latter’s view point. This form of the author’s speech is called entrusted narrative.

    Entrusted narrative can be carried out in the 1^st person singular, when the narrator proceeds with his story openly and explicitly, from his own name: e.g., in “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger. Holden Caulfield himself retells about the crisis in his own life which makes the focus of the novel.

    in “The Great Gatsby” by Sc. Fitzgerald Nick Carraway tells about Jay Gatsby, whom he met on occasionally.

    Entrusted narrative may also be anonymous. The narrator does not openly claim responsibility for the views and evaluations – the narrator has not direct relation to the persons he speaks about.

    In the first case the narration has fewer deviations from the main line, than in the second in which the narrator has to supply the reader also with the information about himself and his connection with the protagonist.

    The narration may be done in the third person. The narrator then focuses on some other character or characters. He may have direct knowledge of these and act as an observer.

    If we take semantics of the text as the foundation of the classification then we shall deal with the three narrative compositional forms traditionally analyzed in poetics and stylistics. They are

1. Narrative proper
2. Description
3. Argumentation
4. The author’s digression

    Narration is the presentation of events in their development. It is a process by which a story is related. It commonly involves a setting, characters and plot, although each of these features may be modified.

    Description is the verbal portrayal; it is used to set mood, provide a setting, characterize a personage or convey information. It supplies the details of the appearance of people and things “populating” the book, of the place and the time of action.

    Argumentation offers causes and effects of the personages’ behaviour, his (or the author’s) considerations about moral, ethical, ideological issues.

    It is rather seldom that any of these compositional forms is used in a “pure”, uninterrupted way. As a rule they intermingle even within the boundaries of a paragraph.

    Digression consists of an insertion of material that has no immediate relation to the theme or action. A digression may be critical, philosophical, lyrical, etc.

    II Somebody else’s speech.

    A very important place is occupied by dialogue, where personages express their minds in the form of uttered speech. In their exchange of remarks the participants of the dialogue, while discussing other people and their actions, expose themselves too. So dialogue is one of the most significant forms of the personage’s self-characterization, which allows the author to seemingly eliminate himself from the process. It also brings the action nearer to the reader, makes it seem more swift and more intense.

    Dramatic monologue. The narrator or the character speaks alone but there are those he addresses himself to.

    Interior monologue. Stream of Consciousness Technique. Another form, which obtained a position of utmost significance in contemporary prose, is interior speech of the personage which allows the author (and the reader) to peep into the inner world of the character, to observe his ideas and views in the making. Interior speech is best known in the form of interior monologue. It is a rather lengthy piece of the text (half a page and over) offering causes for the character’s past, present or future actions. Short in-sert of interior speech present immediate reactions of the character to the remark or action of other characters.

    Sometimes the author tries to portray the disjointed, purely associative manner of thinking which makes interior speech almost or completely incomprehensible. These are instances of the so-called stream of consciousness technique.

    So the personage’s viewpoint can be realized in the uttered (dialogue, monologue) and inner (interior speech) forms. Both are introduced into the text by the author’s remarks containing indications of the personage (his name or the name-substitute) and of the act of speaking (thinking) expressed by such words as “to say”, “to think” and their numerous synonyms.

    III Represented (reported) speech is one of the forms of speech acts observed in artistic prose; it is a peculiar blend of the viewpoints and language spheres of both the author and the character. Represented speech serves to show either the mental reproduction of a once uttered remark or the character’s thinking. The first case is known as represented uttered speech, the second one as represented inner speech. Represented inner speech is close to the personages interior speech in essence, but differs from it in form: it is rendered in the 3^rd person singular and may have the author’s qualitative words, i.e. it reflects the presence of the author’s viewpoint alongside that of the character, while interior speech belongs to the character completely, formally too, materialized through the first-person pronouns.