Abstract
The article aims at showing certain similarities between language and the language of music. Language in the style of music is a highly abstract system. The correlation of literary language and language of music is related to the theory of sign, in which the sign appears sometimes as a unity of the signifier and the signified, which (as some theories argue) could sometimes split. The fact that we think in a particular language may often not be the only way to explain the process of cognition. A person can often think in images, which refers to the concept of “internal speech”, developed by Vygotsky. In contemporary research there is a distinct tendency to approach a fiction as a work of poetry, and compare poetry to music, which indicates a possible correlation and interchangeability of literary language and language of music. The relationship between psycholinguistic theories and a sign theory, the study of the “surface” level of writing provides necessary ground to identify traces of subconscious processes at the speech level, in some cases to correlate it with music. Symbolic aspects of the sign (in contemporary meta-modernist tradition hieroglyphs, the so-called “Vedensky’s hieroglyph as a concept”) allow to trace and address basic properties of the language, or the language of music.
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Notes
- 1.
What is meant here is a view proposed by M. Foucault about three epistemes (an episteme being a philosophical term that refers to a principled system of understanding; scientific knowledge). It also explains how “things'’ and “words'’ relate to each other depending on the historical period (episteme of the Renaissance era, episteme of the Classical era, episteme of the Modern era [7]
- 2.
At the end of the war Salinger was in Normandy. In April 1945 he was among those who liberated Kaufering, one of the divisions of the concentration camp Dachau. The action in the story Just Before the War with the Eskimos is very simple, almost schematic. The action takes place in May 1945, immediately after the war. Ginnie tells her friend Selina that she doesn’t want to pay for the taxi herself. Though the story is schematic, at first sight, it gives a lot of insights. According to the opinion expressed by I. Galinskaya, “the poetic mood of the story is compassion, “the hidden meaning of compassion is felt apart from the direct meaning expressed in the plot”. The researcher points out that the parallelism method is simple: in the living room, in between Selina’s return and Franklin’s departure there appears Erich, Franklin’s friend who tells Ginnie about the homeless writer that he put up at his house feeling sorry for him and introduced to important people. It all ended up with the new friends stealing everything from Franklin and disappearing. The meaning of the parallel is in the movement of the feeling: from offence to compassion as experienced by Ginnie and feeling expressed towards, firstly, Selina and then—Franklin. In the other episode, it is the other way round—the feeling movement from compassion to offence as experienced by Franklin.
- 3.
Organization of the narrative developed by Nabokov, for example, is based on the idea of multiple worlds, in which the reflected worlds are contrasted. The mirror, thus, in literary works denotes the image, the means, the symmetrical composition. If for some post-modern writers, for instance, for Nabokov, the principle of mirror or palindrome on the level of semantics and composition is more evident and frequent (that is the internal play of sounds and words that create the semantic seesaw principle, the simultaneous co-existence of many meanings, the co-existence of places and worlds).
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Shcherbak, N.F. (2021). Theory of Sign and Cognition: Literary Language and the Language of Music. In: Chernigovskaya, T., Eismont, P., Petrova, T. (eds) Language, Music and Gesture: Informational Crossroads. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3742-1_2
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