The phenomenon of heterogeneity of the speech subject in German retrospective discourse
- DOI
- 10.5922/2225-5346-2025-3-5
- Pages
- 73-83
Abstract
The article highlights the features of self-presentation of the subject of retrospective mental and cognitive activity recorded in the texts of memoirs of German-speaking writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. The texts of fiction, which are fictional memories of the narrator and the main character of the narrative in one person, were also used as linguistic material. The novelty of the research is determined by the linguocognitive approach to the problem of interaction of the writer’s / hero’s reflexive personality with their own past SELF in the pro-
cess of reconstructing personal experience. The study preliminarily states the fact of ontologically conditioned heterogeneity of the human Ego as a result of the natural process of individual-personal development. The definition of the concept of ‘retrospective discourse’ is given, which is relevant in the context of the research and referentially correlates with memoir-autobiographical prose. The types of autobiographical SELF mentioned in the relevant literary sources are considered. The forms of explication of the heterogeneity of the speech subject in German-language autobiographical texts are revealed, the main of which is the semantic opposition ‘present SELF — past SELF’, or ‘subject-reconstructor — subject-reconstruct’. The variability of the eventual plurality of the subject-reconstruct and the opposition ‘conscious SELF — unconscious SELF’ are interpreted as the next forms of representation of the substantive splitting of the structure of the speech subject.
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