Elżbieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska

The article refers briefly to the development, over the last half-century, of the sub-discipline of literary linguistics called literary semantics in anglophone tradition (mostly British), pointing out its roots in other scholarly paradigms (among others Russian formalism and the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics) and its close connection with cognitive poetics. The author mentions also a development of studies on artistic language in contemporary Polish linguistic theorizing. Conceived by Trevor Eaton as a broad linguistic approach to literary texts, interdisciplinary in nature, literary semantics – in a natural way – enters into dialogue with translation studies in the area of research called comparative stylistics. The author discusses the notion of semantic dominant, introduced into linguistics by Roman Jakobson in 1976 and into the Polish critical theory of translation by Stanisław Barańczak (2004) to designate the most salient element of the poem’s complex structure, acting as a clue to its interpretation and translation. The examples provided by Barańczak, voiced as metalinguistic comments on the construal of his own translations of selected English poems as well as critical evaluation of other translators’ output, lead us to the conclusion that the concept of semantic dominant should be re-named stylistic dominant, the term that better reflects a peculiar characteristic of a multi-level and often multimodal nature of meaning in poetic texts (plurisignation, after Wheelwright 1954/1968). What’s more, we should talk about sets of stylistic dominants (rather than their single occurrences) that act as keys to complex semantics of poetry. An important dominant remains figuration (troping in particular) but the orchestration of the poem (the totality of its phonetics and versification) and often its graphic layout are of no less import in meaning construction.

The paper is devoted to the concept of tropological space, introduced by Michel Foucault in 1966 and alluded to in Hayden White’s tropics of discourse (1973, 1978, 2000), but never described in any detail in literary semantics or linguistic stylistics. The author presents her theory of a triple functional subdivision of stylistic figures and, consequently, of tropes (micro-, macro- and mega (meta)-level of description) and relates it to a gradually expanding tropological space of particular figures, their chains and groupings within a text. The author postulates that tropological space, the imaginary space created through figuration, is a sub-space of the Wittgensteinian logical space as well as a sub-space of textual / discursive space. Although the discussion refers mostly to literary texts, tropology – a branch of stylistics / poetics / rhetoric makes generalizations valid for the study of all kinds of texts / discourses. Figuration is assumed here to be an inherent feature of conceptual and linguistic expression. Finally, the author raises a methodological query as to the ontological status of tropological space, opting for the approach which treats it as a peculiar kind of semantic space rather than a mere metaphoric term.
The discussion is based mostly on the Anglo-American studies on figuration (K. Burke, H. White, P. de Man, J. Hillis Miller, G. Hartman) that are rooted in the neo-classical rhetoric and writings of G. Vico. This line of thinking draws its philosophical inspiration from the European hermeneutics of P. Ricoeur, the Foucaultian theory of discourses and the Derridean deconstructionist ideas on the operation of language. The author brings additionally into consideration the conception of artistic space propagated by the Russian semiotic tradition and V. N. Toporov (1983/2003) in particular.

The paper, from the field of broadly conceived text studies, focuses on those aspects of the visual arts that bear a storytelling potential, on analogy to verbal texts. My interest lies mainly in the field of artistic semiotics, that is in the texts marked with aesthetic qualities. The attention will go mainly to figural painting and sculpture due to their potential to show events as evolving in time. Thus, I intend to consider the manner in which narrativization as a widely recognized cognitive propensity of the human mind to impose structure upon reality and best realized in verbal storytelling is applicable to pictorial representations and how it takes part in the construction of visual possible worlds/visual text worlds. This article is thus a contribution to semiotic research in intermediality and transmediality in interart relations.