Communicative triangle

This model allows defining

· Genre adherence of the text as well as its functional style, which depend upon the character of interrelation between the author, his text (images, personages) and readers.

· The level of the author’s revelation in the text (markers of the author’s presence).

· The intention of the author as well as his education level, social adherence, attitudes and preferences, including linguistic ones, etc.

When we speak that the very existence of the text depends upon its interrelations with the author and the reader, we should bear in the mind a very complicated character of such relations. In a number of works (for, instance “Интегративная поэтика» 1999) we pointed that such sort of communication is interlinked with the interrelation of a whole range of spheres, frames, concepts and archetypes.

QUESTIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS:

4.2.1. Genre Properties: theoretical background

Here we shall dwell upon genre adherence of the text that to a great extend depends upon the structure of interrelation between the author, his personages (images) and the reader (the addressee). It was Aristotle (4^th century BC) who used for the first time in literary and linguistic theory a communicative principle to define structural deviations between lyrical, epic and dramatic forms. And it was Joyce, who many centuries later (in his novel “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young man) developed these principles. These principles are formulated in the following way:

· If a text suggests immediate interrelations between the author and the reader, and focuses upon self-expression such form should be considered lyrical.

· If a text suggests immediate interrelations between the author, his personages and the reader and focuses upon events such form should be considered epic (modern term - narrative).

· If a text suggests immediate interrelations between the personages and the reader und focuses upon actions (or upon exchange of utterances in modern plays -NNB) such form should be considered dramatic. [Aristotle “Poetics”, J.Joyce “AP”][6]

Modern genre theories rest upon social and cultural approaches. Basil Hatim and Yan Mason, for instance, in their book “ Translation and Discourse” point to a marked conventionality of genres that depends upon social and cultural factors:

Genres are “conventionalized forms of texts” which reflect the functions and goals involved in particular social occasions as well as the purposes of the participants in them 18From a socio-semiotic point of view, this particular use of language is best viewed in terms of norms which are internalized as part of the ability to communicate.19

Daniel Chandler in his “Introduction to Genre theory” offers a blend of Aristotelian and modern approaches:

1. Genres need to be studied as historical phenomena;20.

2. To varying extents, the formal features of genres establish the relationship between producers and interpreters A basic model underlying contemporary media theory is a triangular relationship between the text, its producers and its interpreters. From the perspective of many recent commentators, genres first and foremost provide frameworks within which texts are produced and interpreted. Semiotically, a genre can be seen as a shared code between the producers and interpreters of texts included within it. 21.

3. Genres need to be studied in interrelation and interdependence with their media..

QUESTIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS:

4.2. The Markers of the Communicative Function and Communicative Properties of the text from “Ulysses”

Considering this text from the point of view its genre characteristics, we should point that though it is a passage from a novel its type of communication (personage - reader) allows referring it to the dramatic form while its type of focus (self- expression) to the lyrical form. Anyway a blend of three poetic forms has definite markers. Such blend, in its turn, is caused by the absence of the surface markers of the category of the author. Usually in modern theory this phenomenon is explained as the exposure of intertextuality: "The idea of the author's disappearance has a long history in the century -- it isn't a newfangled concept. Among the people who advocated the disappearance of the author from the text was James Joyce, but modernism in general has stressed that the text stands apart from and is different from the author, and modernism has endorsed the idea that literature is an intertextual phenomenon, that texts mean in relation to other texts, not in relation to the lives of the author. " [Lye, 1997].

We believe, however, that there is a very feeble interdependence between the revelation of intertextuality and the lack of surface markers of the category of the author. We could quote a lot of works where both categories are strongly marked. As an example we may take Henry Fielding’s “Joseph Andrews” (17^th century), a novel where the author is intrusive (D.Lodge) that is he comments, explains his plans and actions of his personages. At the same time this novel has marked intertextual characteristics: it is a parody of Samuel Richardson’s sentimental novel “Pamela’ and develops the plot of this novel. One of its major personages Father Adams is modeled after Don Quixote and the Good Samaritan. The novel itself is structured according to the structures of Cervantes’s novel and the biblical parable of “The Good Samaritan”. Or we may take a novel that is more recognizable by a Russian student. A.S.Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin” is a novel where the author is highly intrusive, at the same time his main character is modeled after at least three literary prototypes: Melmoth- the Wanderer of Charles Maturin, Childe Harold of Byron and a sentimental traveler of numerous 18^th century authors of sentimental novels. Anyway, categories, the category of the author and the category of intertextuality, receive surface markers.

Even if we take Joyce’s texts that are marked by polyfunctional intertextuality it would not be correct to suppose that” they are produced not in relation to the live of the author” and therefore highly intertextual. His biographers pointed to a close link between his life and his works’ contents [see for instanceHayman D. "Ulysses": the mechanics of meaning. (A comment on Joyce’s classic work) -1982]. The absence of surface markers of the category of the author is not only the result of intertextual revelations in the text. It is predominantly the result of Joyce’s artistic and poetic concepts. The concept that predetermined the revelation of the category of the author is formulated as “mimesis” (imitation of nature). Unlike his predecessors who considered mimesis to be imitation of the result of nature’s work in all his works Joyce tended to present reality as a process (imitation to the process), and therefore likened the author (artist) to the god of creation (equal to nature in many ways), who creates and remains silent, hiding behind his images (characters)[Белозерова, 1988].

In this regard, the text under analysis presents the work of a personage’s mind. This text is devoid of the markers of the author’s subjective modality, and at the same time it is rich in the markers of the personage’s subjective modality (revealing Marion’s attitude to her recollections: past events and scenes). We managed to classify these markers when we considered the Informative Function. Yet, however, it would be incorrect to conclude that this text is completely devoid of the author’s presence. Even if in Joyce’s “Ulysses” a reader will face a complete blend of the author and his personage (Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom) or “estrangement”, a device discovered and introduced into modern theory by Victor Shklovsky, a Russian formalist, the presence of the author is evident. The text itself is a marker of this category. Its content, structure, vocabulary usage, syntactic peculiarities witness of the author’s intention, his desire to establish a contact with the reader (phatic and connative functions) his educational and social level, his linguistic and aesthetic preferences. Even if an “intrusive or ignorant reader” tries to read into the text messages that are not rendered by the author, the author’s intention dominates.

The unintentional process of “reading into the text” depends, according to modern semiolinguistic theory, upon two opposite strategies of text decoding:

1. A reader makes use of the accepted aesthetic, verbal, social, cultural and other codes to decode or deconstruct the meaning of the text. [These meanings are said to be encoded, and the code is assumed to be in the world independently of the individuals who are obliged to attach themselves to it (Fish, 1993:57)];

2. A reader herself/himself creates meanings making use of interpretation strategies. [However, meanings are not extracted but made and made not by encoded forms but by interpretive strategies that call forms into being. (Ibid, 1993: 62)].

Anyway, the very possibility of an existence of a complete free interpretation is doubtful, and at this point it is worth sharing Robert Scholes’s point of view who insists that any interpretation depends upon the level of a language acquisition, the knowledge of genre forms peculiarities, upon social behavioral models and preferences [ And interpretation is never totally free but always limited by such prior acquisitions as language, generic norms, social patterns and beliefs. (Scholеs, 1993: 63)].

It may be considered as a paradox, but though a lot of theories on the dominant role of the reader (addressee) are very popular, when a genuine communication between an author, her/his text and her/his reader takes place the category of the reader in the original text remains unmarked. This category reveals itself in the secondary texts (abstracts and other summaries), as well as in translations where the level of adequacy depends upon the accuracy of the reader-translator interpretation (as well as upon the target language peculiarities). Anyway, the absence of the marker of the category of the reader in a primary text does not prevent the researcher to define it as an invariant, and numerous decoded versions of it as variants.

Considering the category of the personage, the markers of which we’ve traced and classified when we scrutinized the informative function of the text, we should note that unlike other chapters, the final chapter as well as the passage from it, lack polyphony. Here with the help of vocabulary usage and queer syntactic structure, and queer punctuation means a single voice (consciousness) sounds and a single point of view (Marion’s) is presented.

QUESTIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS:

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