THE VOLUME AND INSULARITY OF THE LITERARY TEXT

Abstract

Literary text has been an issue of extensive research in numerous linguistic traditions. However, it remains a category open to further investigation. In this article we will mainly consider the seemingly simple issues of the literary text’s volume and insularity. These will be regarded in the perspectives of text linguistics and decoding stylistics. Starting from the definitions suggested in the text linguistics of the 1970s and in Yu.M. Lotman’s semiotic conception, which presents the text of art through the criteria of expressiveness, insularity and structuredness, we will focus on the contemporary treatment of the literary text as a complex sign that triggers the reader’s reflection due to the transparency of its semantic structure. Our theorisation will be supported by textual analyses, mainly by an analysis of J. Joyce’s story “Clay” from the “Dubliners” collection. The procedure involves identifying the semantic links between the title, the beginning and the end of the narrative and the symbolic context of the entire story, which, in its turn, interacts with the thematic structure of the “Dubliners” cycle in the whole. The results of the study demonstrate the relativity of the notions of the text’s volume and insularity, as well as their high potential for further research in the field of cognitive stylistics.