Article

Name: Text-Description as “Zero Degree of a Story”

Authors: I. V. Kuznetsov

Novosibirsk State Theatric Institute (Novosibirsk, Russian Federation)

Abstract:

Narration and reasoning as varieties of speech and text are two parallel ways to deploy the pre-predicative content of internal speech. The am- biguity of these paths is due to the nature of their reference to the two attributes of substance: extension and thought, correspondingly. However, traditional sci- entific and applied classifications distinguish three types of speech and text: narrative, reasoning, and description. In this regard, the system position of the text-description remains unclear, although the importance of it is especially ob- vious when studying works of fiction. Literary typology usually opposes de- scription to narrative by the criterion of statics or dynamics, correspondingly.

The article proposes to consider the description as an eventless kind of speech, in this capacity opposing both eventual narrative and mentative. In addi- tion, it is noted that the description is eidetic, as opposed to the logical narrative and the mentative. So the threefold opposition of speech and text varieties is asymmetric. In this approach, the description constitute itself as a “zero degree of the story”, as a “different”, relative to which other ways of constructing speech and text insist themselves.

The recognition of eventlessness as the most important characteristic of a description makes it possible to distinguish it from ecphrasis, which always carries an element of eventuality. A pure description is a linguistic construct rather than an empirical datum. It occurs only in a very narrow thematic and syntactic range of statements. These are nominatives and similar structures that point to the phenomena of the natural series. Every description of an artifact tends to be ecphrastic, as evidenced by the multiplication of the revealed varie- ties of ecphrasis in recent studies. In addition, in practice, description is usually inseparable from narrative or reasoning. Therefore, the barthesian formula of “zero degree” corresponds to both abstract conditionality and theoretical prima- cy of the description as a simple substance of speech.

Keywords: speech, text, description, asymmetric opposition, ecphrasis, stat- ics, eventless, eidetic

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