ART IN WORDS: EKPHRASTIC REPRESENTATIONS OF PAINTINGS IN THE NOVELS BY D. RUBINA AND M. ATWOOD
DOI: 10.23951/1609-624X-2021-3-92-101
Introduction. The present paper examines a literary figure of ekphrasis and its implementation through intertextual references in fiction. Despite how relatively ‘researched’ the phenomenon of ekphrasis is, the overwhelming majority of existing works focuses on the transfer of meaning between the verbal and visual mediums. This approach omits the reader’s possible interpretation of ekphrastic descriptions and their stylistic expression in texts. The aim of the research is to carry out a linguistic analysis of ekphrastic intertextual references and their possible impact on the reader’s perception of a fictional text. Material and methods. The study is based on ekphrastic abstracts from the novels by Dina Rubina ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ and Margaret Atwood’s ‘Cat’s Eye’. The research methodology uses the following techniques of cognitive poetics: the figure-ground dichotomy, the model of literary resonance, the theory of narrative interrelation. Results and discussion. The cognitive poetic analysis of the ekphrastic representations of characters has shown: • intertextual references link scenes within a narrative; • intertextual references supply additional symbolic and metaphorical meanings to an artwork; • intertextual references imitate the visual organisation of an art object at the syntactic, semantic and textual levels. Conclusion. Using cognitive poetic methods of linguistic analysis, we examined stylistic expression of ekphrasis in a literary text. Taking the role of a figure, the character depicted in the painting acts as a pronounced attractor when influencing the reader’s perception. This perceptual influence is confirmed by the typical semantic, syntactic and stylistic characteristics of attractors presented in the analysed passages. Comparison of the ekphrastic descriptions and the corresponding context revealed the parallelism of the used constructions, which indicates a similar organisation of their figure-background relations. Parallelism can be also marked as specific intertextual references, through which an art object is actualised in the reader’s mind. In addition to the contextual environment, intertextual references contribute to the symbolic realisation of a character in a literary text, complementing their representation with metaphorical and conceptual meanings.
Keywords: ekphrasis, intertextual reference, cognitive poetics, figure, ground, attractor, narrative interrelation, ekphrastic representation
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Issue: 3, 2021
Series of issue: Issue 3
Rubric: GERMANIC AND COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS
Pages: 92 — 101
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