Esthetics of poetic discourse

Abstract

Using the examples of poetry texts by Lina Kostenko, the article provides insight into the concept of speech act analysis of poetic text. This concept elaborates J. Searle’s intentionality concept, T. v. Dijk’s thesis on literary speech act and A. Merilai’s pragmatic poetics. Based upon the Jakobsonian notion of self-referentiality, А. Merilai believes that the poetic utterance performs two speech acts that correspond to two contexts of literary perception: 1) the narrow context, or the aspect of content and reference, 2) the broad context, or the aspect of expression and self-reference. Developing this point, I propose to distinguish two kinds of author’s intention in the poetic discourse: referential and aesthetic, which correlate with the two contexts. The aesthetic intention is the author’s mental direction at the created word form with a positive emotional-evaluative attitude toward it. In a poetic text, the author can express: a) content, by correlating words with states of affairs in the external world, i.e. making reference per se; b) his attitude toward this content, i. e. a referential intention; c) his attitude toward the language form, through which the content is expressed, referring utterances to themselves or making self-reference, i. e. an aesthetic intention. Thus, two speech acts are performed simultaneously: 1) referential, based on the reference per se and the referential intention; it involves an illocution and is fictional; 2) self-referential, based on the self-reference and the aesthetic intention. The latter is a subtype of expressive illocution; the author has an illocutionary goal to express a positive emotional-evaluative attitude toward the word form, as well as a perlocutionary goal to affect the reader's aesthetic feelings regarding this form. Further research should establish the pragmatic characteristics of the poetic discourse of different authors, literary directions and genres.