The role of the intensity category in the implementation of artistic opposition

Бюллетень науки и практики / Bulletin of Science and Practice

UDC 82                                             

Throughout life, a person is faced with the concepts of “life” and “death”, “war” and “peace”, “good” and “evil”. We perceive all the events and phenomena around us through the prism of oppositional relations, which become a way of studying the world around us. The phenomena of opposition, contrast ratio, contradiction form the basis of artistic opposition and have been used since ancient times, when many ancient thinkers noted the important role of the phenomena mentioned above to indicate the expressiveness of the text. The combination of the incongruous, the clash of opposites, the identification of mutually contradictory essences of the same phenomenon accompany the development of the world, including the world of fiction. The fundamental contribution to the study of the phenomenon of opposition in fiction is the theory developed in the works of M. Y. Bloch and O. P. Martynova. Within the framework of the theory, contrast is understood as “an expressive opposition, which is realized through the juxtaposition of representations that differ in the opposite of their features” [4–5].

On the basis of the above-mentioned theory, we call the implementation of opposition in a literary text an expressive opposition, since the content of a phenomenon is marked by a verbal unit or a combination of verbal units that are put in opposition either direct (explicit) or indirect (implicit). The characteristic of the artistic opposition is the development of the essence of the artistic world through the phenomena of opposition, contradiction, contrast ratio.

The dictum of a work in which the technique of artistic opposition is used, has an expressive effect on the recipient. Antithesis is a special case of expressing artistic opposition. Antithesis is a stylistic figure that serves to enhance the expressiveness of speech through a sharp contrast of concepts, thoughts, images. Antithesis and artistic opposition refer to each other as, for example, the singular and plural to the category of number as a whole, reflecting the hyper-hyponymic relationship. A feature of the antithesis can be called the property of correlation with different techniques of expressiveness, as a result, the stylistic technique is rarely used in isolation in the text of a work of art. The category of intensity indicates a measure of the degree of expressiveness of the verbal component wrapped in a dictation of a literary text, which affects the emotional state of the recipient and is expressed in his individual reaction. The author of the work sets the goal of creating a contrasting essence when describing an event, which is often compared with another essence that is emphatically opposite to it. The contrasting essence highlights the oppositional, binary features of objects and phenomena that are mutually repelling from each other. Artistic opposition endows the statement with high impressive power and implements the author's ideas in the language of literature, associated with the oppositional disclosure of the inner world of heroes and events. Artistic opposition is a constituent element of the whole text, therefore, in order to study the phenomenon of opposition, it is necessary to describe the structure of the text of the work. According to the theory of M. Y. Blokh, presented in her work “Seven Lives of the Text”, the creation of the text of the work occurs on the basis of the following stages [3].

• 1)    Birth. The text exists as a design;

• 2)    Dictate formation. Creation of a plot-shaped structure of a literary text;

• 3)    Copyright preference. Making editorial changes to the text;

• 4)    Stylistic processing. Formation of the maximum amplification of the impact of the text, that is, its impressive power.

• 5)    Author's analysis within the framework of aesthetic treatment. Formation of a hypothesis about the reader's perception of the text, which should correspond to the author's intention.

• 6)    Reader analysis. Transformation of the text into a social phenomenon.

• 7)    The life of the text within the framework of criticism. The text begins to exist in a discussion of its advantages and disadvantages.

We associate artistic opposition with the life of the text at all stages of its creation, highlighting from the fourth to the sixth stage, at these stages the author exposes the text to expressive-emotional reinforcement, which forms an influencing force

This goal is realized on the basis of a combination of artistic opposition with other methods of expressiveness, which are influenced by the category of intensity. The systematization of the ways of expressing the category of intensity, influencing the expression of artistic opposition, is represented by three essential groups: 1) Intensity within the type of the verbal component. The typology of intensively-marked verbal units by the type of component is determined by the lexical and grammatical belonging of words and are distinguished: substantive, verbal, adjective and adverbial types.

We study the adjective type of intensity, since in this article the center is an adjective that denotes a sign and reflects, in a specific case, a qualitative indicator of the category of intensity:

“For the first day or two, we took little notice of him: at our school there was no welcoming ceremony, let alone its opposite, the punitive induction. We just registered his presence and waited. For a day or two we simply did not notice him: in our elite school it was not customary to arrange a solemn meeting for newcomers, and even more so - a humiliating “residence permit” [2].

Adjectives can be viewed in a variety of syntactic structures. The syntactic structures in which the category of intensity affects artistic opposition are represented by the following structural units:

a simple common sentence:

“Witnessing the worst of human behavior was a pretty good way of killing off anything soft and fluffy. If you watch humanity from its blackest side from day to day, everything fluffy and soft will inevitably end” [1].

complex non-union sentence:

“Teasing, or calling us to seriousness, he would address me as Anthony; Alex would become Alexander, the unlength enable Colin shortened to Col. Mocking or calling for seriousness, he called me Anthony, Alex — Alexander, the non-extendable name of Colin was pulled into Kol” [2]

complex and compound sentences with comparative, dividing, connecting unions, as well as sentences with an adversative and appositive connection:

“But school is where it all began, so I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.

However, it all started at school, and therefore it is necessary to briefly outline some events that have grown to the scale of historical episodes, and some vague memories, of which time has blinded confidence” [2].

Intensity creates a hierarchy of forms and meanings with the dominant role of the measure of the force of influence on the reader / listener and covers end-to-end speech images, the semantic-stylistic system, the syntactic structure of the dictema, the ratio of semantic fragments, components of the artistic language.

The multi-aspect essence of the category of intensity, as we have noted, is determined both by the peculiarity of the structure of statements and the semantic meaning of the components included in their composition, therefore, the category of intensity is realized at different linguistic levels. Artistic opposition is realized in the verbal component, which is maximally adapted to the expression of the oppositional function.

The opposition component in a literary text is one of the ways to mark expressiveness, it implements the author's intention, connected with the disclosure of the internal and external state of the heroes and with a contrasting depiction of reality. The categories of intensity and artistic opposition are closely interrelated and are the functional and semantic base of a literary work, the leading principles of expressiveness of artistic creativity.