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Section 8. Philology
Bovkunova Oksana, Oles Honchar Dnipropetrovsk National University, Assistant, the Faculty of Ukrainian and Foreign Philology and Arts
E-mail: ov2bovkunova@mail.ru
Elizabethan prose narrative: tendencies and perspectives
Abstract: The article reveals the main factors defining the formation of the English prose fiction in the era of Elizabeth I. Analyzing linguistic exuberance and generic experiments as the main feature of the genesis of prose narrative in Elizabethan England the author comes to the conclusion that the Renaissance artistic consciousness laid the foundations of the development of prose in the literary discourse.
Keywords: the Renaissanse, English prose fiction, genre, style, rhetoric.
of «residual oralism» [5, 38] which naturally lacked the discipline of the medium of print, Jonas Barish argues that it was due rather to the effect of the humanist revival of interest in the classics and the linguistic discipline of rhetoric.
The Renaissance in England marked the transition from middle to modern English. It is also the period in which prose develops as a medium for fiction. Its use increased throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially through translation and early prose narratives. In the Introduction to his «Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction» Paul Salzman talks of «the wide variety of approaches to prose narrative that flourished alongside the vigorous experiments with poetry and drama that characterize the Elizabethan period» [1, 55].
Linguistic exuberance and generic experiment were typical features of a literary discourse in the process of constitution.
Many commentators have noted the coincidence of early modern writing with postromantic, modernist and postmodern productions in reaction against the «unrelenting realism» (Paul Salzman) of the classic realist text. Roger Pooley for example emphasizes: «Many of the changes in recent fiction, even those associated with the postmodern, such as pastiche, the preoccupation with stylishness, and discontinuity, find a curious, partial echo in this earlier fiction» [2, 132].
If Elizabethan prose narratives seem refreshingly liberated from conventional constraints, it is at least partly due to prose's novelty as a literary medium; as Jonas Barish puts it «in the sixteenth century... verse was the norm, and prose the exotic intruder» [3, 148]. Thomas Malory had written the prose Morte D'Arthur in the previous century, but Jonas Barish argues that, despite this, prose as a language for explicitly literary works of art had barely intruded with Malory. Malory's work is based on a principle of linguistic and narrative simplification. What Eugène Vinaver refers to as Malory's «instinctive understanding of the principle of "singleness"» applies as much to his syntax as to his "unravelling" [4, 13] of the complex interlaced narrative threads of his sources, and is responsible for the "apparently effortless narrative movement" of the tales.
In the sixteenth century the situation changed. While Walter Ong regards «Tudor looseness of style» as a symptom
In the hands of sixteenth-century writers, it underwent a series of strenuous trials and errors, in which its possibilities as a literary medium were explored by the importing into it of techniques associated with poetry, medieval pulpit rhetoric, and classic oratory.
The synthesis of different styles in conjunction with an expanded lexical and syntactical range, the demands of print culture for texts, and the influx of translations all helped promote the development of prose. Roger Pooley sums up the complex development of English prose in this period simply: one of the central creations of the seventeenth century was an English prose which had consistently raided Latin vocabulary to expand its technical range, but which had gradually emancipated itself from a need to imitate Latin syntactic patterns.
Despite the excesses of Ciceronianism, Roger Sharrock sees the introduction of more complex syntactical structures based on Latin into English as ultimately «beneficial»: «It is easy to expose the absurdities of Ciceronianism. But... the movement was in the long run more beneficial than harmful. Early Renaissance prose was loose and rambling, and the deliberation needed to compose a periodic sentence had a salutary effect on many writers... many began to think out their sentences as an ordered progress from beginning to end of a statement; too often in early prose, like Topsy, the sentences just grew» [6, 39].
A. C. Partridge analyses these changes from the grammarian's view point, revealing that the differences displayed by poets and prose writers after 1500 are chiefly those of word choice and syntax; vocabulary and the structure of sentences had, in fact, become the important elements in the differentiation of styles. A syntactical development in early New English was its improved co-ordination and subordination of clauses.
Elizabethan prose narrative: tendencies and perspectives
Transitions within paragraphs were eased by the use of relative pronouns derived from the interrogatives who and which, as well as by a variety of new prepositions and conjunctions. Prepositional phrases took the place of the inflected cases and adverbs. «Add to these changes the increased use of auxiliaries, verbs of incomplete predication such as can, may, shall, will and must, and the employment of the primaries be, do and have in the formation of moods and tenses, and the analytical sentence structure which New English from Old English, so broadly accounted for. The period from 1350 to 1500 was the age of grammatical transition, without observers, dictionaries or grammars to make meaningful the confusion» [7, 19].
Elizabethan prose is commonly noted for its self-conscious, patterned quality.
The most notorious example is John Lyly's euphuistic style, characterised by balanced and antithetical constructions, which rely heavily on alliteration and assonance. Its diction conveys an effect of comic paradox produced partly by its syntactical complexity and partly by the juxtaposition of items from differing lexical registers as in the opening chapter of his first work — «Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit», which enjoyed such an immediate success on publication in 1578: « There dwelt in Athens a young gentleman of great patrimony, and of so comely a personage, that it was doubted whether he were more bound to nature for the lineaments of his person, or to fortune for the increase of his possessions. But nature, impatient of comparisons, and as it were disdaining a companion or copartner in her working, added to this comeliness of his body such a sharp capacity of mind that not only she proved fortune counterfeit, but was half of that opinion that she herself was only current» [8, 33].
In the analysis of John Lyly's style, Leah Scragg draws attention to the nature of its syntactical patterning and its derivation from an earlier Latinate style: «The corner-stone of both Lyly's brief period of literary ascendancy, and his lasting importance in the history of the Elizabethan-Jacobean stage, is undoubtedly his development of what has become known as the euphuistic style» [9, 6].
Though the mode itself is significantly older than the prose work with which it is now associated, having roots extending into medieval Latin, it was transformed by John Lyly into an instrument capable of expressing a highly complex vision. At the heart of the euphuistic mode lies the use of antithetical patterning, a sentence characteristically falling into a series of paired clauses, the second matching the first syntactically but contrasting with it in meaning, with the oppositions between the two pointed by assonance and alliteration. More distinctively Lylian is the insistent use of illustrative analogies drawn from classical mythology or the more fabulous aspects of natural history and which turn, like the prose style, on polarity or contradiction. The mode clearly lends itself to (and has its origins in) debate, and familiar debate topics form the starting point for the majority ofJohn Lyly's works.
John Lyly's style draws attention to itself and the contrivances of its art. Philip Sidney's prose in «The Countess of
Pembroke's Arcadia» (1593) similarly employs a diction indebted to a humanistic education with its elaborate syntax, numerous dependent clauses and curious lexis.
Despite the difficulties of maintaining control over its long periods, Philip Sidney achieves an effect of ease and lightness, as in this description of Musidorus's plight after one of many misfortunes: «Musidorus (who, besides he was merely unacquainted in the country, had his wits astonished with sorrow) gave easy consent to that from which he saw no reason to disagree: and therefore (defraying the mariners with a ring bestowed upon them) they took their journey together through Laconia; Claius and Strephon by course carrying his chest for him, Musidorus only bearing in his countenance evident marks of a sorrowful mind supported with a weak body; which they perceiving, and knowing that the violence of sorrow is not, at the first, to be striven withal (being like a mighty beast, sooner tamed with following than overthrown by withstanding) they gave way unto it for that day and the next; never troubling him either with asking questions or finding fault with his melancholy, but rather fitting to his dolour dolourous discourses of their own and other folks' misfortunes» [10, 69].
In the Introduction to Philip Sidney's «Arcadia», Maurice Evans suggests that its ornate, rhetorical style, representing a particular non-naturalistic artistic tradition, is definitive of the Arcadia as «a romance, not a novel» [11, 16].
At the same time an opposite stylistic «countercycle» which tended towards naturalness and the plain style was already «in motion» before this ornate stylistic «cycle» which culminated in the scrollwork of Euphues and the Arcadia, and in the massive sonorities of Hooker's Laws, each a triumph of style that tended to shun, rather than court, resemblance to ordinary speech had run its course a countercycle was in motion that aimed at the exact opposite, at the repudiation of «curiosity» and a return to «naturalness».
Tentatively, first, in the cony-catching pamphlets of Greene and others, and then, more selfconsciously, in the pamphlet skirmishes between Nashe and Harvey, the Cice-ronianism of Ascham and the ornateness of Lyly were arraigned, condemned, and replaced with a licentious style that affected to dispense with all artifice. The first wave of experiment tended to make prose the rival of verse. The second tended to give it a character as distinct as possible from that of verse, and (in principle) as close a possible to the spoken word. In his analysis of the development of modern English prose, Robert Adolph concludes that it was essentially a late seventeenth century phenomenon: «In the Restoration prose became prosaic» [12, 302]. He nevertheless goes back to the previous century in order to explain its development, analysing the difference between pre- and post-Restoration prose styles. Accordingly to Robert Adolph's point ofview writers as different as Bunyan and Dryden understand prose as a vehicle for communicating intelligibly rather than revealing the mind of the author or speaker or showing off his command of literary devices. A writer like Defoe is close to this norm and is the
best possible evidence that great art can emerge from utilitar- The exigencies of the times — print culture, increased literacy
ian presuppositions. Once the norm is established, writers like and use of the vernacular, less emphasis on the Classics, the
Congreve and Swift achieve fine effects by artful deviations rise of science, and Enlightenment thinking — all contributed
from it. Before the Restoration there is no settled norm at to the development of a more pragmatic, less rhetorical prose
all.Attempting to locate a specific point of origin for major style with less need or time for copiousness and redundancy
changes in discursive practice is probably an illusory quest. associated with the needs of the orator.
References:
1. Salzman Paul. An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction/Paul Salzman. - Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
2. Pooley Roger. English Prose ofthe Seventeenth Century 1590-1700/Roger Pooley. - London; NewYork: Longman, 1992.
3. Barish Jonas A. Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy/Jonas A. Barish. - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967.
4. Vinaver Eugène. Introduction/Eugène Vinaver//Malory Thomas. Works [ed. Eugène Vinaver] - London: Oxford University Press, 1971.
5. Ong Walter J. Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing ofthe Word/Walter J. Ong. - London; New York: Methuen, 1982.
6. The Pelican Book of English Prose. Volume 1: From the beginnings to 1780/ed. Roger Sharrock. - Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970.
7. Partridge A. C. Tudor to Augustan English: A Study in Syntax and Style from Caxton to Johnson/A. C. Partridge. - London: André Deutsch, 1969.
8. LylyJohn. Selected Prose and Dramatic Work/John Lyly [edited and introduced by Leah Scragg] - Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1997.
9. Scragg Leah. Introduction/Leah Scragg//Lyly John. Selected Prose and Dramatic Work [edited and introduced by Leah Scragg] - Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1997.
10. Sidney Philip. The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia/Philip Sidney [edited with an introduction by Maurice Evans] - Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977.
11. Evans Maurice. Introduction/Maurice Evans//Sidney Philip. The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia [edited with an introduction by Maurice Evans] - Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977.
12. Adolph Robert. The Rise of Modern Prose Style/Robert Adolph. - Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The M. I. T. Press: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1968.
Matbek Nursulu Kurmanbekkyzy, Candidate of Philological Science, Senior Teacher Ibrayimova Zhibek Tungyshbaevna, Candidate of Philological Science, Senior Teacher Ibragimova Meruert Nurhjigitovna, teachers of history Nusupbaeva Saltanat Adirovna, teachers of history, Al-Farabi KazNU, Almaty, Kazakhstan, the Faculty of Pre-University education E-mail: ibragimova.meruert@mail.ru
Tuvan literary language
Abstract: This article briefly reviews spread area, history of foundation, characteristics and usage area of Tuvan language which belongs to Uyghuric group of languages.
It also studies status of the modern Tuvan language in country and its public and social function. Keywords: state, folklore, literature, writing, phonetics, native language.
Tuvan language is the literary, national and official language for Tuvan people. Its old name is Uriankhai, but Tuvan people called it like Tuva, Tuba, tyva, Kizhi. Tuva language belongs to the Uyghuric group of the Turkic languages and it
closely related to Oguz, ancient Uyghur, Sakha languages. Tuva language is mainly spread in the Republic of Tuva which is situated in the south part of Siberia. According to 2002 census data, about 240 thousand people speak into Tuvan language.
