Author’s semantic presence in the text and actual personality integrity

Abstract

Author’s semantic presence is the textual phenomenon; personality integrity belongs to the life reality. Historically and currently, both are in the focus of research, though with moderate success. The scholastic division of human personality is known for centuries and produces different components. At this, the division of writer’s semantic presence in the text is uncertain, comes in fragments from the antiquity, stays in varying degree in modern creative writing teaching, in particular, in the USA, and also goes into learned judgment about literary texts (when individual semantics is respected, as much as it is by English cultural tradition of penmanship). Besides, the English etymology of «voice», «point of view», «tone», «diction», «dynamics», «stance», and «taste» (7 textual categories) shows their ancient pertinence to the description of author’s semantic presence in the text. However sometime neglected through the ages, such division of the textual individual semantics – with its original roots forever in the antiquity – was an early effort to look for the live completeness of the writer’s personality in his text. This search for the person in the text opened not only the textual semantic elements of human life, but also, which is of the greatest importance, the intuitive feeling of the author’s integrity within his lines and pages. The pleasure of communicating with ‘the truly upright person skillful with words’ (Cato the Elder) – as soon as the writer was up to it – testified in favour of the writer’s presence in his text.
The author of the current article has collected ХІІ meta-textual categories (І. Being author-writer as self-regard; ІІ. Personal independence; ІІІ. Individualism; ІІІ. А. Egoism-egotism (the historical usage that requires translation with a positive meaning); ІV. Integrity; V. Humbleness; VI. Sharing; VII. Truthfulness; VIII. Optimism; IХ. Enthusiasm; X. Common sense; XI. Constructiveness; XII. Imaginativeness) along with 7 textual categories (see fig. 1): the resources were the authentic English materials. The both sets of categories help to discern the individual semantic presence in English texts and gear to various layers of textual meaningfulness. In H. Morton’s «Love and Lavender», «7 textual» and «XII meta-textual» categories initially direct to the culturally correct attitude to the British author, in general, and in particular, reveal several aspects of special meaning that twinkle in a quiet and nice flow of the prevalently the Past Simple narrative and rich collection of cross-textual elements (concepts in common use) concerning Victorian London (see fig. 2). The most interesting of them will be described in the next publication: a string of somewhat «mysterious mood» stitching up the text and a set of meanings worthy being regarded in a kind of psychoanalytic perspective – the both pertain to the individual textual semantics.
As to our current comparison of two kinds of personality presence – the live and the textual – the division into the elements is a relatively minor problem versus the reverse research into the personality integrity. With the latter, the ancient intellectuals were more intuitively successful in the texts, than the modern researchers of the live personality. The exception can be the empathic paradigm of the third generation personality psychology of C.R. Rogers’s and A.H. Maslow’s – they recognise that the harmonious/happy/self-actualizing personality is still awaiting for its theory, however both invested much into it through the only possible way: the empathy with the personality.