Emile Benveniste as Theorist of Poetic Discourse

The article is devoted to the recently discovered materials of the
eminent French linguist Emile Benveniste concerning the analysis of the poetic
language. They represent the remaining manuscripts of the last conscious years
of the life of the French language theorist, with an analysis of Charles Baudelaire’s
poetic work and sketches of a theory of poetic discourse that was pioneering
for that time. The linguist analyzed Baudelaire and lectured about him
in the second half of the 1960s, but due to a serious illness, he did not manage to
finish the research. Benveniste’s attempt to create an original theory of poetic utterance was ahead of time, and in some ways, it outlined aspects of the language
of poetry that are not yet realized in linguistic poetics.
These drafts are not just articles, but a full treatise on the structure of poetic
language, the nature of poetic discourse and the linguistic method of studying
poetry. Neither the article nor the treatise had time to see the light. It seems that
if this happened, the development of linguistic poetics might have gone in other
ways. In any case, theoretical ideas about poetic communication and concrete
empirical findings about Baudelaire’s language made on these four hundred
sheets partly anticipate some subsequent theories of poetic language, and in part
set tasks that have not yet been solved in linguistics. In particular, these are areas
of poetic phonetics, poetic syntax, poetic grammar, poetic lexicology, which
are announced in the manuscript, but also implicitly planned tasks of describing
poetic pragmatics, poetic semiosis, and poetic corpora.
The main result of the pioneering but unfinished Benveniste’s project is an
outline of the conception of poetic discourse, which had no analogues at the
time of its formulation. The French theoretician's conviction that it is necessary
to revise the entire linguistic apparatus with respect to the study of poetic language
and to developing its definitions in this area is extremely important today.
The Baudelaire manuscript shows that the approach to the literary corpus of a
poet is not just one of the applications of linguistic theory, but should be a complex
challenge to linguistics concerning the status of poetic discourse and a particular
poetic work, which, in turn, questions the accepted categories of linguistic
analysis. This is a critical approach to such concepts as communication,
reference, utterance, message, sign, etc. in their projection on the poetic discourse
in its specificity and anthropocentric setting.