Literary Language: Genres, Narrative, and Description Analysis
Literary Language: Genres, Narrative, and Description
Literary Communication
The literary text has several distinguishing elements:
- Issuer: The issuer of the literary work is called author. This role requires specific skills in linguistic expression.
- Receiver: The receiver is the reader, any potential reader, present or future, a universal receiver. To achieve genuine communication, the reader must interpret the text and attribute meaning. The absence of a single, unequivocal meaning in literary texts stems from the openness of the work and the act of reading, which enriches the text through diverse interpretations over time.
- Channel: Literature involves deferred and unambiguous communication. Communication occurs across two potentially distant moments: the situation of creation and the act of reading. The channel must ensure the unaltered continuation of the text, the only constant between these two moments.
- Context: Unlike a conversation, literary texts lack a physical situation. However, both the writer and their work, as well as the reader, are conditioned by their own historical, social, and cultural circumstances. A key concept is fiction. The world represented in the literary work is distinct from reality. Both author and reader accept the convention that the text does not convey direct information about the real world. Thus, the work builds its own context.
- Message: Literary messages have no practical purpose. Their nature is artistic, intended to produce a selfless spiritual pleasure.
The Literalness of the Literary Text
The literary text is designed to endure, unlike common language. It is a literal message, intended to be preserved as originally created. It is impossible to separate the expression from its content.
Poetic Function
The message has an aesthetic purpose, not an immediate practical one. The uniqueness of literary texts lies in how the message draws attention to itself through various mechanisms, making the form of the statement a dominant factor. In literary texts, the sequence is projected onto the paradigm, which in turn generates new phrase paradigms, making the statement the seat of all types of recurrences. This achieves several purposes:
- Automatization of Ordinary Language: Common language becomes worn through habit. Literary language renews language through new forms and relationships, making an object seem “strange” or “deviant” from regular use.
- Connotative Values: The concept of connotative meaning contrasts with denotative or referential meaning, referring to the associations a term evokes.
- Multiple Meanings: Literary texts have multiple meanings, allowing for different interpretations and readings.
Classification of Figures and Tropes
Literary figures are based on basic principles: recurrence, contrast, deletion, intensification, and substitution:
- Recurrence: Many figures repeat language units: sounds, words, syntactic structures, and meaning (correlation, etc.).
- Contrast: Other figures use contrasts between units: chiasmus, antithesis, oxymoron, or paradox.
- Elision: The removal of an expected item through ellipsis, reticence, suspension…
- Intensification: Resources that amplify an idea or element: hyperbole, pleonasm…
- Substitution: Replacing an item with a different one: metaphor, allegory, metonymy, synesthesia, irony.