CC BY
6УДК 821.111
Филологические науки
Вишнякова А. В., к. филол. наук, доцент кафедры «Лингводидактика и зарубежная филология» Севастопольский государственный университет, Россия, г. Севастополь
THEORETICAL FUNDAMENTALS OF IMPERSONAL THEORY IN
LITERATURE
Аннотация: В статье рассматривается мировоззренческая система Т.С. Элиота и А. Ричардса. Основополагающие цели обоих исследователей совпадают: исследование языка поэзии. В исследованиях используются достижения новейших наук - современной психологии и семантики. Подобно Т.С. Элиоту, А. Ричардс убежден, что поэзия способствует «цельности человеческого восприятия». В поэзии выделяется два уровня -интеллектуальный и эмоциональный. Первый играет в поэзии второстепенную роль. Главным является второй, связанный с психологией, психологическими реакциями личности, которые отличаются хаотичностью, противоречивостью.
Ключевые слова: эмоциональный язык, символический язык, текст, математический знак, литература, художественный стиль, автор, литературоведение, лингвистика, поэзия.
Abstract: The article deals with the worldview system of T. S. Eliot and A. Richards. The fundamental goals of both researchers are the same: the study of the language of poetry. The research involves the use of the latest achievements of the science of modern psychology and semantics. Like T. S. Eliot, A. Richards is convinced that poetry contributes to the "integrity of human perception". In poetry, there are two levels - intellectual and emotional. The former plays a secondary role in poetry. The main one is the second one, which is related to psychology, psychological reactions of the individual, which are chaotic and contradictory.
Key words: emotive language, symbolic language, text, mathematical sign, literature, artistic style, author, literary studies, careful reading, linguistics, poetry.
The main task of A. Richards coincides with the goals of T. S. Eliot. T. S. Eliot went down in the history of literature and culture as a reformer of English-language poetry and literary criticism, a legislator of literary tastes, a Creator of new forms of poetic expression, adequate to the worldview of the "urban man" of the XX century, who lost the romantic illusions of the past, who survived the tragedy of the war. The Creation of T. S. Eliot's literary-critical works was initiated by the live literary process in England and America, 1910-20-ies occurring in the conditions of crisis of the old philosophical schools of positivism and subjective idealism, infertility in the English poetry and criticism, still focused on the aesthetics of late romanticism, though it had long ceased to meet the requirements of the day. He acted as a poet-critic: with a reform in poetry, expressing a modern, non-romantic, urban worldview in the most modern ways of poetic expression, and in parallel-with a revision of the theory of poetry, its nature and purpose at a new historical and literary stage of its development [4].
T. S. Eliot's literary and critical works, according To S. S. Siletskaya, are valuable in themselves: they not only contain an exposition of the author's literary and critical views, but are also works of art themselves. For example, "in the essay Hamlet, Eliot subjects a literary work to a rigorous analysis, presents the reader with his own concept of the aesthetic value of a work of art, and resorts to convincing the reader of its truth not only to rational arguments, but also to expressive images" [2]. Eliot put forward a number of fundamental ideas: the concept of literary tradition, extrapersonal or impersonal poetry, the theory of "objective correlate", which somehow reflected T. S. Eliot's views on the role of the author in a literary work. Let's look at each of them in detail.
Tradition as a category of modernist aesthetics was most fully and conceptually understood in the critical works of T. S. Eliot. His artistic practice became a vivid
example of organic inclusion in the European cultural tradition from the moment of its origin and formation.
In his critical works, T. S. Eliot formed a universal, dynamic theory of tradition based on the understanding of the existence of "simultaneous ordering" of great literary works in time-eternity. This ideal proportionality is an open system, all the literature of Europe from Homer to the present day exists simultaneously and forms a complete proportionate unity. T. S. Eliot is characterized by a vision of the flow of being and the history of literature in the "context of a single moment". T. S. Eliot's sense of history is a sense of the timeless and the temporary in their inseparability. It is this simultaneous existence in the "small historical" and "big time" that allows the writer to become equally traditional and modern; the author of the theory creates his works at the intersection of these spaces. Eliot's concept of a unified European culture is based primarily on the desire to identify the genetic unity of various national traditions, create prerequisites for a productive cultural dialogue, define common universal spiritual values, and affirm the supranational value of poetry. This is a study of the language of poetry. But he approaches it using the achievements of the latest Sciences - modern psychology and semantics. Like T. S. Eliot, A. Richards is convinced that poetry contributes to the integrity of human perception. In poetry, A. Richards distinguishes two levels - intellectual and emotional. The first plays a secondary role in poetry, according to the literary critic. The main one is the second one, which is related to psychology, psychological reactions of the individual. These reactions, the scientist believes, are chaotic and contradictory. In each, even a short period of time, a person experiences a variety of emotions. And it's not fun. On the contrary, it leads to all sorts of psychological irritations and inconveniences. And in order to overcome this chaos of feelings and impressions, a person turns to art, in particular, to poetry. The latter, through rhythm and pleasant sound, contributes to the formation of a dynamic equilibrium, the balance of opposing psychological forces. Poetry helps the reader or listener to group various life phenomena in such a way that it begins to give aesthetic pleasure.
From the point of view of A. Richards, poetry first of all makes it possible to evoke and organize complex psychological impulses in a person. The more psychological impulses a work of art evokes, the more significant it is. The key that allows the author to call the desired combination of impulses is a correctly found word. However, each individual word in a literary work is understood only through its functioning in the General context of the work; the interaction of contexts is the basis of Richards ' semantic approach to the work of art. The mechanism of this interaction is determined by the fact that, on the one hand, each reader brings his own set of contexts to the work, that are naturally not controlled by the author, and, on the other hand, the words of a literary work contain contexts that are controlled by the author.
The result of the interaction of these and other complexes of contexts is such that each reader perceives the work in a unique way, differently from the author, than every other reader. According to Ivor Richards, a true idea of a work is given only by a careful analysis of the denotative and connotative meanings of the words that make it up, as well as their relationships. Outside of these words, neither the author nor the reader knows anything about the work. A. Richards clearly expresses this opinion. "My ideas", he writes in his work "Poetic creativity and poetic analysis", are broadly understood in my language: in the relationship of words that guides my choice of using these words" [1, p.317]. Not always conscious mutual influences of words belong equally to the literary process and literary analysis. By choosing words, the poet allows them to control his choice in the way he hopes, and the reader allows them to control his choice. The reader can follow the poet exactly in understanding, analyzing, and evaluating a work, but the most important thing is that both are controlled by the language and limited by its understanding. Poems are created by words, not poets, respectively, the main disadvantages of interpretation are arbitrariness and lack of evidence. They are based on ignoring the semantic structure of the language and evaluating the language element without taking into account the context. The interpreter must take into account the smallest details of the interaction of a word with other words.
In his works "Principles of literary criticism" [4] and "Practical criticism" [3] (1929), A. Richards investigated the reader's perception and interpretation of a literary text, studied the factors that affect perception and interpretation. As a result, he put forward the concept of "the only correct reading of the text", offering the so -called method of "closed reading" ("careful reading"), which consists in focusing attention on the work as such, without distraction to fix one's own response to the work and to identify connections with the surrounding reality. In this case, a necessary condition is a thorough reading of the text, a detailed analysis of various semantic shades of words, a comparison of sound, rhythmic composition and semantic structure. This method has become fundamental in modern literary criticism.
A. Richards is a relativist in his contextual theory. Moreover, he argues that poetry, by ordering our minds, is generally indifferent to the real external world. The value of a work of art consists for him not in the objective truth he carries and the unique concrete-sensuous form of its expression, but in the functional role of individual elements for obtaining a complete context of impulses. The wholeness of the context is declared organic, standing above the simple sum of parts. This integrity can be perceived only by carefully and repeatedly reading the text of the work. Like Z. Freud, a. Richards attributes some therapeutic functions to poetry. In Z. Freud, artistic creativity, overcoming repressed drives, saves from neuroses, in A. Richards, poetry helps to find peace of mind. Like Freud, the English literary critic sublimates the psychological into the aesthetic. As part of his theory of poetic creativity, A. Richards developed the concept of emotive language. It is contrasted by the researcher with the symbolic language. The latter is the language of science. It is one-dimensional and unambiguous. Its ideal is clear wording (for example: Twice two is four). The symbol is understood by A. Richards simply as a "sign". The ideal symbol, according to A. Richards, is a mathematical sign. It is obvious that the English scholar's understanding of the symbol is diametrically opposed to that of the symbolist poets.
In contrast to the symbolic, emotive language does not have the precision of expression. Its purpose is not to make a statement, but to excite a certain feeling. Emotive language, emotive words are generators of emotions. A. Richards is ready to agree that the element of reference, i.e. indications of things and phenomena of the world, is also present in emotive, poetic language, but this element is insignificant and secondary. As a result, the reader of poetic works should not wonder how true they are. The reminder of the difference between scientific, symbolic, and emotive use of language makes many readers who are not artistically receptive, dismissive and even hostile to poetry. They think it doesn't copy reality accurately enough. They are not able to understand the specifics of the emotive language that is the basis of poetry. A. Richards points to the struggle that is being waged in our time between the supporters of the poetic and scientific world. Representatives of the scientific worldview strive to get rid of all emotionality, while poets "dream of reviving greatness in the age of science, freeing it from the burden of knowledge and symbolic truths" [4, p.15].
Thus, we can draw the following conclusions: A. Richards, as one of the greatest literary thinkers in England of the twentieth century, sought to solve the most complex aesthetic problems. A special place in his critical conception was occupied by the question of authorship and authorship. The main idea of A. Richards was the idea of complete automaticity of the work from its author. Equating the importance of science and artistic creativity, the critic considered poetry as a "kind of knowledge", a purely aesthetic phenomenon, a means and goal of aesthetic experiment. Accordingly, the text was declared the subject of literary criticism as a self-sufficient reality that does not need to study the historical or psychological factors that influenced its author.
Библиографический список:
1. Eliot T.S. John Bramhall / T.S. Eliot // Selected Essays. - London, 1963. - 357 p.
2. Graves R. On English Poetry / Robert Graves. - London, 1922. - 149 p.
3. Read H. Collected Essays in Literary Criticism / H. Read. - L.: 1954. -
44 p.
4. Richards J. Principles of Literary Criticism / J. Richards. — L, N.Y., 1938. - 275 p.
