2020 Vol. 11 №1

The roundtable discussed the key problems of meaning formation in narrative and per­formative practices. In free discussion, experts analysed various factors and parameters de­termining the meaningfulness of action and examined mechanisms for their interpretation. These mechanisms can be considered as manifestations of various modally different types of textualisation. Interpretation and textualisation make it possible to identify and describe the interaction between some causal and functional relations (‘meaning in life’) and their semiotic manifestation (‘meaning in the text’).

Since the British philosopher John Austin, narratives and performatives have been con­sidered as opposite concepts covered by the generic concept of speech act. At the same time, these concepts were separated according to whether a narrative, inducement, a description, or an imperative was present in the text. Similar to the narrative, the performative is created under pressure from various external factors associated with the system of public communica­tions, to which the author is exposed, and a multitude of reasons that reflect in his or her mind external processes. All these factors and influences transmute in the course of text crea­tion; the viewer/reader consumes ready-made information, which invariably bears an imprint of the author's habitus. When creating a text, the author conveys his or her desires and ex­presses his or her attitude to the chosen problem. This study aims to answers two questions. Can a narrative have at its core an explicit manipulative basis or a hidden motive? Can the picture of the world, which develops, inter alia, under the influence of narratives, serve as a pattern for decision-making by the viewer/reader? It is necessary to this end to identify the relationship between the performative and the narrative (there are several types of these rela­tionships). To answer the above question, the genesis of narratives is considered, possible nar­rative–performative combinations analysed, and the effects of performatives on the formation of the intentional component of the narrative established. The findings suggest that each nar­rative contains at least one performative and that the narrative is based on the performative and contains a manipulative component.

This paper explores hybrid texts as a special type of text that forms within ‘inter-discourse interaction’ and relates to the ‘convergence of discourses’. The analysis focuses on the interaction between avant-garde art and political discourses, which have been in close contact since the 20th century and have common typological features. The main methods used in this study are the linguistic pragmatic method, the linguistic poetic method, and discourse analysis. The article proposes a definition of hybridization and hybrid texts while distinguish­ing between the linguistic, genre, multimodal, and multimedia types of hybridization. Special cases of language hybrids are onomatopoeic hybrids, which are based on the sounds of hostili­ties; hybrid words formed with a hyphen or a connecting vowel; bifocal semantic hybrids; and hybrid syntactic constructions. Genre hybridization occurs in avant-garde art and poetic manifestos, decrees, and declarations. Multimodal hybrids include artistic-political texts in which a combination of codes (verbal, visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc.) co-exists with a com­bination of various types of discourse. At the same time, each of the elements of a multimodal hybrid message refers simultaneously to both artistic and political reality. The multimedia type of hybridization includes texts that use innovative technologies and new media channels while combining several information transfer channels. This way, a new system of relation­ships is built and the possibility arises to create a new ‘total work of art’.

This paper discusses a discourse grounding strategy that has not been described before. It is shown that the fragments of a literary text that are perceived as impressive, aphoristic, etc., tend to have a set of recurrent features. Firstly, in such fragments, there often is mutual re­flectedness of meanings (it emerges in metaphors, similes, parallelisms, or juxtapositions of contradictory notions). Second, mutual reflectedness goes through pronounced detrivializa­tion, i.e it is emphasised using special means, one of which is the ostentatious intricacy of the text usually achieved through amphiboly, or intended ambiguity. Thirdly, there is usually a strong anaphoric link between such fragments and the preceding text, i. e. a link between sub­jects and/or objects (this does not exclude adjunct-based links). Fourthly, the type of discourse relation between such fragments and the previous text is highly predictable. The main conclu­sion drawn in the article is that the described set of properties, which is instrumental in discourse grounding, is widely used in literature, on the one hand, and it is much more complex than the grounding devices earlier studied by narratology.

Using an excerpt from Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, this article explores the idea that, in a literary text, a fictional world and the world of physical reality may interact to form such a reality that can paradoxically turn out to be more real than what we believe to be the actual reality. It is also shown that the fictional world realized in a literary text may bring the reader to certain conclusions about the world in which he or she lives. Thus, even if literature is in­capable of affecting reality, it can change the way the latter is perceived. A fictional world is not just a reality — it is a reality of a higher order.