Methodology and methods of english fiction research

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METHODOLOGY AND METHODS OF ENGLISH FICTION RESEARCH

Lavrenchuk M.V.,

Senior English lecturer, Department of foreign languages Lviv Polytechnic National University

Summary

This article provides the understanding to different conceptualizations of aspects of text. However, the main issue in respect of narrative and genre is the question of whether narrative is simply one of a number of genres or whether narrative is more like a fundamental mode of human thought which “can be realized across a range of genres using different modes and media.”

There are fewer intrinsic genres than there are particular meanings. Intrinsic genre is that sense of the whole by means of which an interpreter can correctly understand any part in its determinacy, and so is not identical with the utterance's particular meaning which “arises when the generic expectations have been fulfilled in a particular way by a particular sequence of words.”

Discourse offers meaning to be realized, it shapes the world of knowledge as ideational content and provides a social-conceptual location. “Genre offers the means for contextualizing/locating/situating that meaning in social spaces and at the same time provides an account of the social characteristics of these spaces.”

As an object of research multimodality is considered as a process and the result of the interaction of the plurality of semiotic resources involved in the communication process. It reflects the reality and, at the same time, the imaginary world of the author. Literary methodology is a system of theoretical and practical research, a complex of logical methods of critical reception. Recently, the systematic approach is increasingly used in literary studies. Adequate comprehension of a certain literary phenomenon, its professional scientific analysis does not require a one-sided approach, limited by someone methodology, but needs a holistic, complex that is system approach.

Any speech message or literary text determines its author and at the same time selects the addressee, which is equally the subjects of cultural processes: the author as the subject of cultural creativity and the addressee as the subject of cultural perception.

Key words: multimodality, linguistics, cohesion, composition, approach. 

Анотація

text genre whether thought

Методологія та методи дослідження англійської художньої літератури. Лавренчук М.

Ця стаття надає розуміння різних концептуалізацій аспектів тексту. Однак головним питанням щодо наративу та жанру є питання про те, чи є наратив просто одним із багатьох жанрів, чи оповідь більше нагадує фундаментальний спосіб людського мислення, який «може бути реалізований у ряді жанрів за допомогою різних способів». і ЗМІ».

Є менше внутрішніх жанрів, ніж конкретних значень. Внутрішній жанр - це те відчуття цілого, за допомогою якого інтерпретатор може правильно зрозуміти будь-яку частину його детермінації, і тому не є ідентичним конкретному значенню висловлювання, яке «виникає, коли загальні очікування були виконані певним чином конкретним послідовність слів».

Дискурс пропонує зміст, який потрібно реалізувати, він формує світ знань як ідейний зміст і забезпечує соціально-концептуальне розташування. «Жанр пропонує засоби для контекстуалізації/розташування/розташування цього значення в соціальних просторах і водночас забезпечує врахування соціальних характеристик цих просторів».

В якості об'єкта дослідження мультимодальність розглядається як процес і результат взаємодії множинності семіотичних ресурсів, що беруть участь у процесі спілкування. Вона відображає дійсність і водночас уявний світ автора. Літературознавча методологія -- це система теоретичних і практичних досліджень, комплекс логічних прийомів критичної рецепції. Останнім часом у літературознавстві все ширше використовується системний підхід. Адекватне осмислення певного літературного явища, його фаховий науковий аналіз потребує не однобічного підходу, обмеженого чиєюсь методологією, а потребує цілісного, комплексного, тобто системного підходу.

Будь-яке мовленнєве повідомлення чи художній текст визначає свого автора і водночас обирає адресата, яким однаково є суб'єкти культурних процесів: автор як суб'єкт культурної творчості та адресат як суб'єкт культуросприйняття.

Ключові слова: мультимодальність, лінгвістика, когезія, композиція, підхід

Formulation of the scientific problem

Anthropological linguistics views language through “the prism of the core anthropological concept, culture, and, as such, seeks to uncover the meaning behind the use, misuse, or non-use of language, its different forms, registers and styles.” It is an `interpretive' discipline peeling away at language to find `cultural understandings' [1].

A substantive side of the anthropological paradigm is the study of human language. However, it is not easy to establish, which phenomena and processes are determined and predefined in the language by the human factor, and which do not depend on it.

Analysis of the latest investigations of the question

The investigation lies in searching the new tendencies of multimodal actualization of literary texts and to study problems of semiotic- eclectic text which are highly popular in modern linguistics.

Multimodality describes approaches that understand communication and representation “to be more than about language, and which attend to the full range of communicational forms people use - image, gesture, gaze, posture and the relationships between them” [2]. A number of concepts central to multimodality are introduced: these include mode, semiotic resource, materiality, modal affordance, multimodal ensemble and meaning functions.

Setting objectives

In linguistics, which has chosen the anthropological principle as its methodological bases, in the center of attention are two issues:

- identifying how do people affect the language;

- determining how does language influence the person, his thinking, culture.

In the dimensions of anthropocentricity, the question of the literary text as a process is significant, where the structural model of its description as a self-sufficient hermetic creation becomes inadequate, which calls for the consideration of the social circumstances of communication and the features of communicants. This is “the transition to a communicatively oriented model of the text, the essence of which is revealed when it is considered as a phenomenon of culture” [3, p. 85-92].

Presentation of the basic material

The formed anthropocentric paradigm in linguistics most fully reveals the nature of the human factor in different communication situations, the central link of which is the text.

Any speech message or literary text determines its author and at the same time selects the addressee, which is equally the subjects of cultural processes: the author - as the subject of cultural creativity, the addressee - as the subject of cultural perception. Writing fiction, the author deliberately or subconsciously takes into account the factor of the addressee, is guided by a certain group of hypothetical readers.

Transfer of a situation author reader is primarily determined linguistically because “it is associated with the manifestation of inter-level sociolinguistic correlations, which enable the authorwriter to qualitatively reproduce in the minds of the reader a real- life situation” [3, p. 103-104].

The writer's appeal to the mind of the addressee, the reader in general, can perform various artistic tasks, subordinated to the ultimate goal - to create the preconditions for the formation and enrichment in the process of perception of the type of reader's awareness - an experience closest to the pragmatic attitude to the writer's ideological position. The widespread means

of nominating the recipient or recipients of the message are verbal and pronoun forms of the second person singular / plural You.

(1) “But it's fake,” I said. “The face is just painted on.” “Sure, the paint is fake. It was for a circus show. But I'm telling you, he had two mouths. You do not believe me?” [4, p. 382].

The recipient, as can be seen from the example given (1), is recorded as a character in the fairy, in the form of direct appeal. Multiple forms of forms of expression of the author's speech, which form the complex pattern of the narrative of the work, leads to the emergence of text anthropocenters - the narrator and character, the presence of which forms in the work of art two speech streams - speech speaker and speech character.

Functional linguists are interested in both individual texts and “the systems from which they derive, text and language, process and system, parole and langue in other terms.” [5].

The system of a language is instantiated in the form of text. There is a relation of mutual dependence: while a text `is an instance of an underlying system, and has no meaningful existence except as such, language as system can only be observed through text; it is a virtual thing; it is not the sum of all possible texts but a theoretical entity to which we can assign certain properties and which we can invest with considerable explanatory power.

Language can be viewed from two semantic perspectives:

• generically as semiotic system; representing the full meaning potential available to speakers, the full set of semantic options available to a speaker, what he or she can mean in contrast to what he or she can't mean;

• specifically as text; representing a socially constructed instance of the system. This simply means that text is the result of the meanings that were actually selected, it is the output of the semiotic system.

“Multimodality is built on a `functional theory of meaning', an idea of meaning as social action realized through people's situated modal choices and the way they combine and organize these resources into multimodal ensembles” [6, p. 213]. It distinguishes between three different but interconnected categories of meaning choices (also called meta-functions) that are simultaneously made when people communicate:

• choices related to how people realise content meanings (known as Ideational meaning), that is, the resources people choose to represent the world and their experience of it, for example, what is depicted about processes, relations, events, participants, and circumstances;

• choices related to how people articulate Interpersonal meanings, that is, the resources that people choose to represent the social relations between themselves and those they are communicating with - either directly via interaction or via a text or artefact. For example, the visual or spatial depiction of elements as near and far, direct or oblique, are resources used to orient viewers or inter-actors to a text or one another;

• choices concerned with textual or organizational meaning, for example, the choice of resources such as space, layout, pace and rhythm for realizing the cohesion, composition, and structure of a text or interaction.

Halliday proposes that language is `a system of meaning potential'. Seen to operate on the levels of the content and expression plane, meaning potential is conceived as a network of options where meaning is made through paradigmatic selections from the available system networks. “Language is an abstraction until it is materialized or expressed through either speech or writing, the process in the form of a text. The visual image is similarly a tool for meaning construction.” [6, p. 213]. That is, the pictorial semiotic resource is also seen as a conceptual abstraction with systems of meaning constituting the meaning potential.

Under the influence of anthropocentrism, “non-traditional approaches to the description of individual language systems, language levels and their units were formed” [7]. The inclusion of the so-called human factor into the scope of the linguistic research put forward the functional approach to language.

It is the study of language in action, in its functions. Because of this, the object of linguistics is not a language, but speech, recognition of speech and language as an ontologically unified phenomenon. Orientation to the speech, particularly to the statement, discourse, forces us to reconsider the theory of hierarchical organization of language, reordering its units not by place in the general hierarchical system, but using their internal functions. However, the main thing in modern functionalism is the principal setting for the study and description of language from the semantic functions to the means of their realization in language. In this respect, functionalism takes into account the different approaches to language, depending on the role, in which the user of the language distinguishes grammar, speaker and listener in the speech act.

Fairy text is a peculiar kind of communication because along with communicative-informational function it has communicative- aesthetic function. As a result of the embodiment of the writer's thoughts, the fairy text appears to the reader as “a subjectively painted result of the artistic image of the reflection of the objective world.” [8, p. 172-186].

Subjectivization, which is the co-creation of the author and the reader, leads to the over lap of the characteristic soft the particular addressee of the message in the process of perception.

Among British literature, especially modern fairy tales, new complex text structure and semiotic components are fixed. Cohesion and coherence play an important role in modern fiction. Such fairy texts have multilingual structure and they are composed of text and artistic information. They form new kind of a text which combines words, sounds, graphics, animation and video.

Cohesion is a feature of discourse structure which, equivalently, gives a text its texture. We can interpret cohesion, in practice, as “the set of semantic resources for linking a sentence with what has gone before”. And again: “the concept of cohesion accounts for the essential semantic relations whereby any passage of speech or writing is enabled to function as a text.” [9, p. 63-64].

But as we know, a text does not consist of sentences, it is realized by sentences. There are a number of distinct categories for the classification of cohesive devices: categories which have a theoretical basis as distinct types of cohesive relation, but which also provide a practical means for describing and analysing texts. These categories represent general ways in which cohesion functions, and within each category there is a detailed list of the particular ways in which the cohesive relation is given formal instantiation. Thus reference can be instantiated by personal pronouns, by demonstrative adjectives, demonstrative adverbs, the definite article and so on.

“Cohesion is a typical but not obligatory feature of the text and it is created with the help of multiple structural and lexical-semantic means which can be applied in various combinations.” [10, p. 88]. As long as cohesion, structural unity of all elements of a literary text, is explicit and can be measured, analysis of peculiarities of lexical- grammatical unities allows us to investigate the author's style and discourse of various types.

Linguists always consider cohesion as the most important text category, which provides coherence of a literary text. “The coherence of a text is reflected in and signalled by the cohesion in the text.” [11, p. 51].

1) It was strange to them that I should be so young, but what was strange to me was how young they seemed.

2) He looked at me strangely. Where'd you get those?

3) I always knew I was strange. I never dreamed I was peculiar [11, p. 127, 134, 186].

This sentence raises the obvious expectation that the text will somewhere describe how strange the main character is. Here, coherence arises out of the fact that the writer is picking up an earlier point and adding to it and is reflected in the language that connects the two sentences. In the sentence (2) the writer emphasis on the adjective `strange' referring to the feelings of all children and a boy. From the sentence (3) we understand that adverb `strangely ' is referred only to the boy. And last sentence (4) shows us direct relation of adjective `strange ' to the main character. Finally they are connected by items that refer out of the text to the same entity (co-reference): the pronoun `I' in sentence (4) refers to `me', the same entity referred to in sentences (2) and (3). In this way the writer both reflects and signals to the reader the coherence to be detected between these sentences.

Fairy text is an artistic literary genre. A generic conception is apparently not something stable, but something that varies in the process of understanding. At first it is `vague and empty'; later, as understanding proceeds, “the genre becomes more explicit, and its range of expectations becomes much narrower.” [12, p. 32].

This means that the initial assumption of genre is always open to revision and the whole genre is constituted by as well as constituting its parts.

The fairy tale itself may have a different style, artistic differenсes associated with the author's interpretation of the text, individual thinking, language features that is fairy tale combined style, language fairy system.

There has been a growing trend towards eclecticism, where “a cultural text creatively mixes, blends, or recombines pre-existing and relatively discrete cultural forms, formulas and techniques” [13, p. 172]. Such media production practices result in fairy texts, which can be particularly challenging for their readers, as their conventional frames for understanding media content may be inadequate or even inappropriate.

The combination of genre hybridisation and multimodality has given birth to even more boundary-crossing media types. The rising sophistication of computer animation and production techniques has facilitated the creation of multimodal content of an extremely high quality, such that genre-hybridisation in films and books has broken new ground.

“A genre of discourse is associated with a certain organization, one of the key areas of text linguistics” [14, p. 150]. To control a genre of discourse is to have awareness, more or less clearly, of the modes in which its components are linked at different levels.

Conclusions

As an object of research multimodality is considered as a process and the result of the interaction of the plurality of semiotic resources involved in the communication process. It reflects the reality and, at the same time, the imaginary world of the author. Literary methodology is a system of theoretical and practical research, a complex of logical methods of critical reception. Recently, the systematic approach is increasingly used in literary studies. Adequate comprehension of a certain literary phenomenon, its professional scientific analysis does not require a one-sided approach, limited by someone methodology, but needs a holistic, complex that is system approach.

Any speech message or literary text determines its author and at the same time selects the addressee, which is equally the subjects of cultural processes: the author as the subject of cultural creativity and the addressee as the subject of cultural perception.

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