Genesis of theoretically-critical thought about contemporary fiction

Размещено на http://www.allbest.ru/

Genesis of theoretically-critical thought about contemporary fiction

Pukaliak M., Teacher, Foreign Languages Department, Lviv Polytechnic National University

The article explores the investigation 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. ”

The composition performs an organizational function at the levels of its formal and content structures. Due to the expedient arrangement of elements of the composition of the text realizes its integrity and connectivity. This is due to the diverse compositional techniques, the use of which is determined primarily by the author's intention to create a certain aesthetic image, to realize pragmatic influence on the recipient of the text.

Key words: fiction, multimodality, discourse, linguistics, tendency

Походження теоретично-критичної думки про сучасну художню літературу

Пукаляк М., викладач кафедри іноземних мов Національного університету «Львівська політехніка»

У статті досліджено дослідження нових тенденцій багатомодальної актуалізації літературних текстів та вивчення проблем семіотико-еклектичного тексту, які користуються високою популярністю в сучасній лінгвістиці. Мультимодальність описує підходи, які дають розуміння, що спілкування та представлення «стосується більше ніж мови, і там де мова бере участь у повному спектрі комунікаційних форм, якими користуються люди - зображення, жести, погляд, постава та відносини між ними».

Ключові слова: художня література, мультимодальність, дискурс, лінгвістика, тенденція.

Происхождение теоретико-критической мысли о современной литературе

Пукаляк М. преподаватель кафедры иностранных языков Национального университета «Львовская политехника»

В статье проанализированы исследования новых тенденций многомодальной актуализации литературных текстов и изучение проблем семиотико-эклектичного текста, которые пользуются высокой популярностью в современной лингвистике. Мультимодальнисть описывает подходы, которые дают понимание, что общение и представление «относится больше чем к языку, и там, где речь участвует в полном спектре коммуникационных форм, которыми пользуются люди - изображение, жесты, взгляд, осанка и отношения между ними».

Ключевые слова: художественная литература, мультимодальнисть, дискурс, лингвистика, тенденция.

Formulation of the scientific problem

Everything from the placement of images to the organization of the content creates meaning. This is the result of a shift from isolated text being relied on as the primary source of communication, to the image being utilized more frequently in the digital age. The multimodal approach takes into account how linguistics and visual choices fulfill the purposes of the text, the audience and context, and how those choices work together in the organisation and development of information and ideas.

Analysis of the latest investigations of the question

Modern British literary process is characterized by actively seeking such a form of artistic discourse in which diversity and pluralism cultural situation, the designated aesthetic code of postmodernism came to an adequate semantic and structural expressions. The peculiarity of multimodal fairy tales is the use in their text of various ways of rendering information simultaneously. Methodological framework for comprehensive analysis of the above- mentioned linguistic phenomenon is developed.

The aim of the research is to determine multimodality and its place in modern British fairy text as a sign system.

Presentation of the basic material and interpretation of the results of investigation

Text can be defined as the visible evidence of a reasonably self-contained purposeful interaction between one or more writers and one or more readers, in which the writer control the interaction and produce most of the language. The whole interaction can be referred to as a discourse. Text can be compared to a site of interaction between a writer and readers which the writer controls.

`Text' and `discourse' are current notions in present-day linguistic discussion. The two terms cover a wide range of meanings and connotations in linguistic and everyday scientific language. The first stage of linguistics in our century was characterized by a close relationship to the notion of `sign', as developed in Ferdinand de Saussure's and his followers' ideas about language. “Signs are the elements of a system Saussure called `langue'. The idea of langue makes use of two theoretical concepts, the idea of `relation associative' (associative relation), and of `relation syntagmatique' (syntagmatic relation).”1 These two types of relation form the structural characteristics of language as a sign system.

Theory of text within linguistics is underway. Text itself has so far been regarded rather as a fictional piece than linguistic phenomenon. “All known definitions of text dwell on its structurally-semantic unity and its communicative completion. However principle issue lies in defining the `text' to be the unit of higher level in language hierarchy or unit of speech. In communicative linguistics text is regarded as dynamic communicative unit of a higher rank owing to which the communicative activity is carried out” [1].

Saussure sees language as a grammatical system which allows the speakers to select and combine the smallest distinctive linguistic units and thus to produce an infinite number of correct sentences. Subject to a language system (langue), they can realise an infinite number of grammatically correct sentences in speech (parole). For Saussure, every sign has a meaning, to the extent that it has a value in a semiotic system. Meaning, therefore, is perceived as the product of grammatical rules producing sentences.

“Saussure supported the idea that language is an arbitrary system and that linguistic signs are not directly linked with the world” [2]. This model has been taken as a model for approaches to discourse which aim at revealing the underlying rules and grammars of social and cultural phenomena.

Literature itself is a speech context. And as with any utterance, “the way people produce and understand literary works depends enormously on unspoken, culturally- shared knowledge of the rules, conventions and expectations that are in play when language is used in that context” [3].

In linguistics “'discourse' denotes a 'stretch of language' larger than a sentence. Latterly, the term has acquired much wider meanings and much wider implications” [4]. Basically it is language which is understood as utterance and thus involves subjects who speak and write - which presupposes listeners and readers who, in a sense, are objects. Discourse has an object and is directed to or at an object. Thus, in theory at any rate, discourse might include any modes of umerance as a part of social practice. They are differentiated by their intention. Thus, discourse may be poetry or prose. It may be a poem, a philosophical essay, a political tract, a biblical commentary a speech on the hustings, a funeral address, a polemic, a dialogue or an exercise in deconstructive criticism. It may be any number of things.

Discourse does not only represent what people do, think and are in the social world; representing the world can also mean constituting it in a certain way. Although discourse analysis has been a busy field of activity for many years, there is a good deal of uncertainty about what it actually is.

The generally accepted view is that it has something to do with looking at language above or beyond the sentence, but this is hardly an exact formulation. Roughly speaking, it refers to attempts to study the organization of language above the sentence, or above the clause, and therefore to study larger linguistic units, such as conversational exchanges or written.

For Harris Widdowson, clearly, discourse analysis is a set of procedures for establishing underlying formal equivalences within a text. Although his work is motivated by the belief that “language does not occur in stray words or sentences, but in connected discourse, it is the connectedness itself that is focused on rather than on its discourse implication” [5].

“Fiction is a vague and general term for an imaginative work, usually in prose. At any rate, it does not normally cover poetry and drama though both are a form of fiction in that they are moulded and contrived - or feigned. Fiction is now used in general of the novel, the short story the novella and related genres” [6].

Text could be conceived of as a dialogue between author and audience, writer and reader. Fictional texts seem to fit this model of interaction quite well. In such a case there is a writer who has a certain kind of reader in mind and that kind of reader then comes to the text and accepts what the writer offers. But this model of reading and of the interaction that operates in text is very limiting if one looks at a wider range of texts. In the first place it treats writing as a proactive process and reading as a receptive process. The audience of a text is the intended readership, the imaginary person whom the writer addresses and whose questions s/he tries to answer.

By intention, Wimsatt and Beardsley mean “what he intended, that is, the design or plan in the author's mind.The intention is outside the text; the text achieves a kind of independence from the originating intention, a life beyond it. However, it is only intention's conception as `momentary' which permits the possibility of this beyond” [7]. According to the blueprint conception of intention, the relationship between design or intention and work is analogous to that between cause and effect, and the designing intellect is a cause of a poem while stipulating that, as such, it should not be treated as a standard by which the critic is to judge the worth of the poet's performance.The cause in this instance is, notably, private and the effect that it predicts is provisional, due to the possible limitations or opportunities which the chosen form of expression will impose or provide.

The interactions amongst author, writer, audience and reader are complex. The author has a purpose in communicating to the audience and authorises the writer to produce a text that will achieve that purpose. “The writer composes a fiction text for an audience that may or may not match the description of the actual readers” [8]. The readers also have a purpose in reading the fiction which may not be the one that the writer had in mind and may not be congruent with the author's original purpose.

“A literary work is a textually embodied conceptual structure, whose conceptual component is identical to the structure - compatible with its text - which its author intended (meant) in composing it” . [9].

Among the main aspects of the composition study are problems of complex definition of the term, delineation of external and internal compositions, outlining functional-semantic features of composite parts of texts, etc. Not taking into consideration the cultural scale and historical experience of study, the only approach to the interpretation of this category does not exist at present. Mostly the composition is considered as the form or content phenomenon. The main categories of the text include the form and content categories where the composition is a component of the form category. The concept of composition is interpreted as a form, that systematize, provides integrity. In a dynamic aspect, “the composition is defined as a motivated arrangement components (fragments of the text); in each of them there is a certain way of the image (characteristic, description, dialogue, monologue) or a separate point of view (author, narrator, the character) regarding the depicted” [10]. In view of this, the composition ensures unity of a literary work.

“The fairy belongs to folk literature and is part of the oral tradition. In its written form the fairy tale tends to be a narrative in prose about the fortunes and misfornrnes of a hero or heroine who, having experienced various adventures of a more or less supernatural kind, lives happily ever after. Magic, charms, disguise and spells are some of the major ingredients of such stories, which are often subtle in their interpretation of human fiature and psychology” .[11].

Narratology in literary theory is the study of narrative structure and principle. It is the study of the logic, principles, and practices of narrative representation. Narratology studies the form and the technique.

“The structure of a work determines its integrity, completeness and unity” [13] Composition of a fairy text is predetermined by author's intentions, genre and content of the literary work. It embodies system of combination of all its elements.

The composition not only provides a syntagmatic sequence of elements of the fairy text, but also participates in the formation of logical connections established between them. It is identified with a network of links between plots covering the entire work. “In the context of contemporary research of the composition, were outlined structural criteria of organization of the text such as multiplicity, dynamism and variability” [14].

The sense of dynamization of the composition is interleaving, changing and stratification of the verbal rows. Due to this, the transformation of the original text material into composite version is happening. The key to transformation is interaction and interpenetration elements of the text. Compositional transformation means to replace actualizators, that is, semantically filled elements that play an important role in the structure of the text. According to the above concept, no element of the text can be positionally fixed in the composition. Its position and functions depend on the selected strategy of interpreting the text.

Literary text serves as a representation of the unique and exclusive artistic world, which is “an independent modal structure” [15].

Among the main features of modern fairy, the plurality of options of interpretations is determined. Fairy text has inexhaustible interpretation potential and infinite plurality of meanings that create an open literary work. So, compositional structure of the fairy text is considered as a formal organization of its elements in particular syntagmatic sequence or hierarchical dependence. From the point of view of informativity compositional components are not homogeneous, since the most important information is concentrated preferably in strong text positions.

When taking into consideration the compositional structure of the text portions, size, fragments, integrity, functional specificity are distinguished. These aspects are taken into account in formocentric and content approaches to defining the concept of composition. However, in conditions of the modern process of text formation we should take into account the following structural principles of organization such as dynamism, variability, plurality. This is connected with traditional for postmodernism conception of an open literary work.

“If narrative purpose, coherence, rationality are founded on and speak the notion of integral selfhood, then vagueness, indirection and ambigious symbolisation express awareness of self-fragmentation” [16].

Among the main functions of the composition is the systematization and organization of form and content of the text. With the help of compositional techniques, the integrity of the text is realized, that is its property, which implies the presence of thematic, conceptual, modal and situational unity.

Two types of textual connectivity are identified - cohesion and coherence. Cohesion (local connectivity) is “a connection of a linear type that has formal expression mainly with the help of linguistic means” .[17]. It is based on the pronoun substitutions, lexical repetitions, use of conjugations, correlation of grammatical forms. It is hard to find reasons to believe that the position the author should assume for himself is one in which he is a provider of often incoherent thoughts and feelings regarding how he experiences life and reality, rather than the more traditional position in which the author tells a story with characters and their acts being the main focus.

Unlike cohesion, coherence (global connectivity) - is the connectivity of a non-linear type that combines elements of different levels of text. The most important means of providing coherence include repetitions of words with common semantic components and parallelism. In fiction there may be semantic chains - rows of words with common sema. Their interaction provides the generation of new semantic ties, relationships. “Deploying semantic rows (chains), their location and relationship determine the semantic composition of the text” [18].

But, as has been frequently noted in the literature, cohesion does not of itself lead to the realization of a text as a coherent discourse. “Identifying cohesive links by noticing how semantic features are copied across different items and how items act upon each other by the modification principle will narrow down the pragmatic possibilities, but cannot determine interpretation.”

Conclusion

The composition performs an organizational function at the levels of its formal and content structures. Due to the expedient arrangement of elements of the composition of the text realizes its integrity and connectivity. This is due to the diverse compositional techniques, the use of which is determined primarily by the author's intention to create a certain aesthetic image, to realize pragmatic influence on the recipient of the text.

Perspectives for further investigations. Analysts of our mediated society today like to stress the idea that we live in a visual age, that our primary mode of communication are images or visually organized digital texts. Multimodality describes communication practices in terms of the textual, aural, linguistic, spatial, and visual resources - or modes - used to compose messages. Where media are concerned, multimodality is the use of several modes to create a single artifact. The collection of these modes, or elements, contributes to how multimodality affects different rhetorical situations, or opportunities for increasing an audience's reception of an idea or concept.

multimodality fairy text compositional

References

1. Austin J. How to do things with words. Cambridge: Mass., Oxford: Clarendon press, 1962. 100 p.

2. Bednarek M., Martin J.R. New Discourse on Language: Functional Perspectives on Multimodality, Identity, and Affiliation. London; New York: Continuum, 2010. 280 p.

3. Beaugrande R., Dressler W. Introduction to Text Linguistics. London; New York: Routledge, 1981.286 p.

4. Bohlmann M. Misfit children: An Inquiry into Childhood Belongings. London: Lexington Books, 2016. 290p.

5. Bowers F. Textual & Literary Criticism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1966. 200 p.

6. Brown D. The Modernist Self in Twentieth-Century English Literature: A Study of Self-Fragmentation. Hampshire; London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1989. 206 p.

7. Carter R., Simpson P. Language, Discourse and Literature. An introductory in Discourse stylistics. London; New York: Routledge, 1995. 296 p.

8. Cohn N. The Visual Language of Comics: Introduction to the Structure and Cognition of Sequential Images. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 224 p.

9. Dijk Van T.A. Discourse as Structure and Process. London: Sage Publications, 1997. 356 p.

10. Doloughan F. Contemporary Narrative: Textual Production, Multimodality and Multiliteracies. London and New York: Continuum, 2011. 168 p.

11. Duranti A. Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 126 p.;

12. Foley A.W. Anthropological Linguistics: An introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. 422 p.

13. Enkvist N.E. From Text to Interpretability: A Contribution to the Discussion of Basic Terms in Text Linguistics. Connexity and Coherence: Analysis of text and Discourse. New York: Walter de Gruyter & Co, 1989. 382 p.

14. Golban P. The vector of methodology in fiction studies. Researchgate. December 18, 2014.

15. Halliday M.A.K. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Second edition. Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press: Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd., 1994. 497 p.

16. Halliday M.A. K. Language as social semiotic: the social interpretation of language and meaning. London: Edward Arnold, 1978. 256 p.

17. Hoey M. Textual interaction: An introduction to written discourse analysis. London; New York: Routledge, 2001.224 p.

18. Jewitt C. The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis. London: Routledge Falmer, 2009. 368 p.

Размещено на Allbest.ru