Stylistic Case

Lecture 1. Literary text as a poetic structure

1. Verbal and supraverbal layers of the literary text

2. Principles of poetic structure cohesion

2.1 Principle of incomplete representation

2.2 Principle of analogy and contrast

2.3 Principle of recurrence

1. Verbal and supraverbal layers of the literary text

While reading a literary text one gradually moves from the first word of it on to the last. The words one reads combine into phrases, phrases into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs making up larger passages: chapters, sections, and parts. All these represent the ver¬bal (словесный) layer of the literary text.

At the same time when one reads a text of imaginative literature one cannot but see another layer gradually emerging out of these verbal sequences. One sees that word sequences represent a series of events, conflicts and circumstances in which characters of the literary work happen to find themselves.

One sees that all these word-sequences make a composition, a plot, a genre, and a style, that they all go to create an image of reality and that through this image the author conveys his message, his vision of the world.

Plot, theme, composition, genre, style, images and the like make the supraverbal ['suːprə] (poetic) layer which is revealed in verbal sequences. The supra-verbal and the verbal layers of the text are thus insepa¬rable from each other.

Thus, the text of a literary work is not a mere linguistic entity, it is something more in¬volved. The involved nature of the literary text makes it entirely individual (unique), makes it essentially unsubstitutable for any other word sequences. When we substi¬tute some part of a literary text, i.e. some given word sequence for a synonymous one, we simultaneously change the content, for the content of the literary work is indi¬visible from its text. A linguistic text, on the contrary, allows of substitution; one verbal sequence may have a sense similar to that of another verbal sequence, consequently, one verbal sequence may stand for another.

E.g. «The mass-produced middle-class boys I had to teach were bad enough» when viewed just as a linguistic entity it allows of a number of substitutions, such as: "the boys from middle-class I had to teach were all alike", or "there was no any personality among the boys I had to teach", etc. When this sentence is a part of a literary text its meaning cannot be completely rendered in so many other synonymous words. Something of the meaning will be left unconveyed. And this something is the implication the sentence acquires from the whole of the supraverbal layer. To understand what "the mass-produced