Scarica Riassunto Lotman Y., Analysis of the Poetic Text, Ann Arbor, Ardis Publishers, 1976; e più Dispense in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! Essay 1: THE STRUCTURAL POETICS OF YURI LOTMAN I INTRODUCTION Here is introduced the figure of the Professor Lotman, the preeminent figure in Soviet Literary structuralism. He has published three books dealing with structural analysis of poems. Readers of the present book may obtain a fair idea of all three of these works which thus far collectively constitute the only major ex position of Soviet literary structuralism. His first ex position of his theoretical views was his book 1. “Lectures on Structural Poetics: Introduction, The Theory of Poetry” which appeared in 1964 he expounds a general theory of art as a semiotic system subject to interpretative modeling and structural analysis. The central part of the work is an attempt at a structural analysis of poetry on its various levels: -rhythm and rhyme - phonological level - grammatical -lexical - more abstract levels such as: line, stanza - general problems such as plot - the problem of the poetic text and its relationship to extra-textual structures. 2. The second book is “The Structur of the Artistic Text”, 1970 offers a wider perspective on structuralism as an approach to allo f the representational arts. Treats such problems: - as art as language, meaning the artistic text - the concept of the text - its (the text) relationship to the system it manifests. - the principles of the text are esamine in terms of its paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes while the various levels - their organizing entities are considered in separate chapters. - questions of composition as: framing, artistic space, character, plot, plane and point of view. But Lotman assumes a detailed familiarità with much of Russian literature, so the non-Russian reader may feel a certain discontinuity between theory and practice. 3. “The Analysis of the Poetic Text: The Structure of Poetry” is an attempt to provide some illustration of the relationship between his theory and the actual critical analysis of poetic language. Its first part appears a duplication of the first book, treating a recapitulation of Lotman’s basic theoretical constructs; the second half instead demonstrates the application of his structuralist theory of criticism to the detailed analysis of some Russian poems and illustrate various aspects of the methodology of structural analysis. II GENERAL THEORETICAL CONCEPTS Essay’s goals are two: 1. To present an integrated overview of Lotman’s theory; 2. An attempted assessment of the value of these ideas in practice. We shall survey the fundamental concepts of Professor Lotman’s teorie by setting them out in three more or less separate but interdipendent categories: 1. General theoretical foundations 2. Organizing processes and analytic principles 3. Levels of analysis and their units. All these sections reflects various topical sections of the Analysis. Professor Lotman’s theory of literature rests upon two closely related sets of fundamental concepts: 1. Semiotics that science of signs and sign systems which studies the 1. characteristics of all signs and their combinations: es: words and word combinations, the metaphors of poetic language, etc… Treats systems of signs in the language. The presence of two aspects are obligatory for each sign: 1. Signifying material aspect. ES: Language, pronunciation or writing is the signifying aspect 2. Signified meaning ES: contenti s the signified aspect The idea of system is inherent in semiotics. System implies structure and nothing can be understood without these concepts. 2. Structuralism the idea of a system: a complete self regulating entity that asapts to new conditions by transforming its features while retaining its systematic structure. This relevance of structuralism to literary studies are matters of dispute in Europe. Soviet scholars make the following points: - structure, in reference to literary studies, implies the study of the constructive elements of the poetic work in their dependance on the artistic whole. Structure may be complex. In order to determine the structure o fan entità it’s necessary to engage in a model process wherein the invariant properties of this entità may be isolated and esamine in their indipendent relations. Here is important an important a dichotomy that Lotman takes over into his poetic semantics: PARADIGMATIC AND SINTAGMATIC AXES 1. Paradigmatic axes is the associative plane of language wherein each structural elementi s viewed in relation to some set whose members are associated by a relationship of op position. 2. Sytagmatic axes refers to the linear unity of language and the unification of different items in a text. The basic relationship is that of contrast. For literature dominates syntagmatic axis For poetry dominates paradigmatic axis. An important tool in under standing the workings of complex entities such as language and literature is colled MODEL. Only invariant entities are characterized by meaning. Lotman’s “PRIMARY MODELING SYSTEM” Natural language is a model of the world while spcific language are models of their various cultural systems. Lotman’s “SECONDARY MODELING SYSTEM” poetic or belletristic language and other art forms Language and literature are the most complex human systems. The number of factors and the intricacy interrelations makes comprehension difficult. The sound of a natural language is a good illustration: A sophisticated analysis of the sound system of any natural language will show many dozens and even hundreds of distinguishable sounds. An important word is FUNCTIONAL. The function of the sound system of a language is communication and it can easily be demonnstrated that mosto f the vast number of sound variants that occur in a language are not essential to its comunicative function. Es: “t” in tin may be pronounced in a number of variants and will continue to be understood as long as the variants of t don’t slip over into the range of pronunciation of variants characterizing a different functional sounf in that language ES: “d” “s” “p”. would result in different words with different meanings. PHONEME the entire range of pronunciational variants of a single sound. Is an invariant element within the functional sound system. ALLOPHONE any fiven representative sound of that class. Are variants of of a phoneme. A PHONEM may be defined as smaller set of organizational oppositions applicable to all natural languages. This is a series of binary oppositions “t” “d” are members of correlated pair opposed by the distintive feature of voicing. IN SUMMARY ALL OF THE INVARIANT SOUNDS CAN BE UNDERSTOOD AS AN INTERLOCKING SYSTEM CONSTITUTED BY A SET OF BASIC INVARIANT ENTITIES AND THEIR PERMISSIBLE COMBINATIONS. Language is made up of a number of different levels, the phonological level iso f course only one. We have to consider also the morphology, syntax, semantics, etc… The structure of language, the model of the world it represents, influences the way in which the individual and the culture perceive and under stand reality. Thus NATURAL LANGUAGE IS A PRIMARY IV THE LEVELS OF ANALYSIS Structural analysis of the poetic text derives from out look and procedures elaborated in structural linguistics. One of the central tenets of structural linguistics is that language is composed of a number of different levels. Poetry language in addiction to these levels has a number of structural entities which are uniquely the province of belletristic language. These include the poetic lie, the stanza, the text itself. 1. Graphic Level Graphic systems are often a distorting overlay concealing the phonological and morphological levels of language. It’s unusual including here. Lotman incorporate such a level into his model. Art as a whole is a communicational system and representational graphics may be just as much a part of the overall semiotic system of literature as is the overtly semantic component. One of the most general features of natural language is that the relationship between form and contenti s conventional and that our norkal perception of the language is automatized. The graphic level is particuarly striking example of the special nature of poetic language, for in non belletristic language writing typographical data are apprehended automatically whereas in poetic language sych data are non automatic and may carry meaning. Typographical considerations alone, such as the coincidence of verse line and graphic line, mark a text as poetic. The graphic level provides illustration of another regularity that recurs on all levels of the structural hierarchy. In earlier times graphic devices were often an integral part of poetry. Not only in the use of poeti cline but in the use of frames, vignettes, and so on. ES: a love poem printed in the shape of a heart. This is a case of ICONICITY in which visual appearance carries esthetic information. Such features came to ve viewed as markers of poetry as opposed to prose. 2. The Phonological Level Sound patterning is the dimensiono f poetry which separates poetry from non poetry. Of all structural levels, that of sound is the best understood and gives great contribution to the study of poetry. Allitteration and rhyme rely on recurrence of similar sounds. In ordinary language phonemes do dont bear meaning and the association of sound and meaning is a matter of convention. In poetic language is not so. The levels of sound and meaning interact and this interaction may either take the formo f the sound system reinforcing a lexical level or enter in conflict with it. This is called semanticization of phonemes onopatopoeic and synesthetic phenomena. 3. The Morphological Level The most insightful aspect of Lotman’s structuralist approach to literature is his analysis of the grammatical level. Consonant with his principle that in artistic language all elements may bear esthetic information Lotman argues that purely formal grammatical meanings do in fact become artistic devices in poetry. Lotman deriving his interpretation from Roman Jakobson sets this process in another dimension. Rather than focusing on low level choices, Lotman considers the role of hifh level grammatical categories in the meaning of the work of art. Lotman shows how this formal skeleton of grammatical meaning may constitute a counterpoit to the meaning of a poem. This intermeshing profoundly contributes to the esthetic impact of a poem. Grammatical categories are features inherent in human language and function below the level of cosciousness. The book at page xxiii give examples of pronouns. 4. The Lexical Level is the entire vocabulary of that particolar poetic universe. Words externally identical in two lexicons may or may not coincide in meaing. The shorter a text, the more important each word is. Lexical items may play an important role in poetry for while their meaning is unclear they are the more significant and implication-laden for the reader. 5. The Line The poetic line is different and more complex to the prose line. The prose line is an external unit defined by typographic considerations of spacing. The poetic line is an internal integral entità defined by a complex of fsctors drawn from various levels of poetic structure. These include the levels of metrics, intonation, syntax and rhyme. All of these levels have their own meanings which may either complement or conflict with the surface lexical meaning of the line. Like other elements of poetic language, the line strives for independent meaning while it simultsneously is part of a larger structure. It shares this tendency with other lower and higher level entities of poetic language. This continuum includes smaller entities sucj as phoneme, sound patterning, morpheme, and larger ones as that of rhyme pattern, stanza, text. Each of these entities function as a ad hoc word, an integral meaning. 6. The Stanza Has an internal and an external aspect. It’s facoltative, unlike the ones above. It functions as a unit and has its own well defined internal structure. The minimal stanz consists of 2 lines, a couplet. The lines forming a stanza may constitute a hierarchy structured in terms of interlocking unities of various levels such as meter, rhyme, sense. In estreme cases, these units may blend into highly structued entities, such as a poem with an initial quatrains advancing a tesi, a second quadrai with an antithesis and a concluding synthesizing couplet. 7. The Compositional Level A poetic text is an indivisibile sign whose integrality is assured by the interaction of its constituent levels of organization. The interrelations of these levels is the sphere of the compositional level. 8. The Text iso ne of the central concepts in structuralist criticism, is used at various levels of abstraction. In one sensevthe text is the highest level of the analysis of a poem. It is the sum of the poem’s constituent levels. It’s the poem itself.