Seminar 11 basic notions of the text Discussion Points

1.Text as a subject-matter of various disciplines: hermeneutics, history and theory of literature, stylistics, text linguistics, text interpretation.

2. Different approaches to text definition. Types of texts according to the structural patterns. Literary text as opposed to other types of texts.

3. Basic categories of a literary text.

• personality/ impersonality;

• integrity (cohesion; coherence);

• text discreteness (partitioning and composition);

• informativity; kinds of information in the text;

• implicitness;

• modality.

4. Textual reference and the artistic model of the world.

Fictional time and space. The notions of prospection and retrospection. Main spatial dimensions.

5. Types of artistic (poetic) details:

• depicting details;

• characterological details;

• authenticity details;

• implicit details; degrees of implicates.

Recommended Literature

1. Арнольд И.В. Стилистика современного английского языка. – М.: Просвещение, 1990. – С.34-41.

2. Гальперин И.Р. Текст как объект лингвистического исследования. – М.: Наука, 1981.

3. Долинин К.А. Интерпретация текста. – М.: Просвещение, 1985. – C. 4-34, 63-180.

4. Домашнев А.К., Шишкина И.П., Гончарова Е.А. Интерпретация художественного текста. – М.: Просвещение, 1989. – C. 15-68, 76-96.

5. Кухаренко В.А. Інтерпретація тексту. – Вінниця: Нова книга, 2004. – С. 6-15; 72- 138.

6. Стилистика английского языка / А.Н.Мороховский, О.П.Воробьёва, Н.И.Лихошерст, З.В.Тимошенко. – К.: Вища школа, 1991. – C. 200-211.

Practical assignment

Activity I.

Task 1. Read the text, explain what categories are actualized in the title.

Task 2. Analyse the cohesive elements, in particularly lexical and syntactical repetitions, their role in the text organization.

Task 3. Explain the author's attitude to the world he lived in and to his profession - is it positive or negative? Write out the examples.

S. Maugham. Looking back on eighty years

In my long life I have seen many changes in our habits and customs. The world, that I entered when at the age of eighteen I became a medical student, was a world that knew nothing of planes, motor-cars, cinemas, radio or telephone. When I was still at school a lecturer came to Canterbury and showed us boys a new machine which reproduced the human voice. It was the first gramophone. The world that I entered was a world that warmed itself with coal fires, lit itself by gas and paraffin lamps, and looked upon a bathroom as a luxury.

On Sundays the muffin man made his rounds ringing his bell, and the people came out of their doors to buy muffins for afternoon tea.

It was a very cheap world. When I entered the medical college attached to St. Thomas's Hospital I took some furnished rooms for which I paid 18 shillings a week. My landlady provided me with a solid breakfast before I went to the hospital and high tea when I came back at half past six, and the two meals cost me about 12 shillings a week.

I had enough money to go to the theatre at least once a week. The pit to which I went was not the thing it is now. There were no queues. The crowd collected at the doors, and when the door opened there was a struggle to get a good place. But that was part of the fun.

Travelling was cheap, too, in those days. When I was twenty I went to Italy for the six weeks of the Easter vacation.

I did my practical work at St. Thomas's Hospital. I was a bad medical student, because my heart was not in it. I wanted, I had always wanted, to be a writer, and in the evening, after my tea, I wrote and read.

I wrote a novel, called "Liza of Lambeth", sent it to a publisher, and it was accepted. It appeared during my last year at the hospital and had something of a success. I felt I could give up medicine and make writing my profession. So three days after passing the final examinations which gave me my medical qualifications, I set out for Spain to learn Spanish and write another book. Looking back now, after these years, and knowing the terrible difficulties of making a living by writing, I realize that I was taking fearful risk. I gave up the medical profession with relief, but I do not regret the five years which I spent at the hospital.

They taught me all I know about human nature. People in pain, people in fear of death, do not try to hide anything from their doctor.

The next ten years were very hard. 1 wrote several novels, a number of plays which publishers returned to me.

Then I had a bit of luck. The manager of the Court Theatre read a play of mine, called "Lady Frederick". It ran for fifteen months.

I had four plays running in London at the same time. Nothing of the kind had ever happened before, and the papers wrote much about it. I may say without immodesty, I was the talk of the town. One of the students at St. Thomas's Hospital asked the eminent surgeon with whom I had worked whether he remembered me.

"Yes, I remember him quite well," he said. "Very sad. Very sad. One of our failures, I'm afraid."

Activity II.

Task 1. Read the poem, explain by what lexical and syntactical means the category of cohesion is actualized.

Task 2. Read the text again, determine the means of realization of modality.