RECEPTIVE DIMENSIONS OF SPATIAL IMAGE

Abstract

This article presents an observation of the literary image of space through the prism of receptive poetics. Based on the theory of Oleksandr Potebnja, the peculiarities of metonymic and metaphorical ways of verbal representation of space are revealed, which are intertwined in the text at different levels of the literary work structure, determining the phenomenological specificity of its functioning.
Potebnian’s idea of figurative speech as a discrepancy between the subject and its meaning corresponds to Wolfgang Iser’s observations on the textual lacuna, filled by the reader’s creative imagination.
The article traces the specifics of spatial image functioning in a first- and third-person narrative and in lyrics. The third-person narrative draws three-dimensional space and, turning the reader into an invisible observer, sometimes brings us close to the object. Then it unfolds a panoramic picture in front of us, moving us to the depicted world with the help of a spatial perspective. The spatial coordinates of the first-person narrative are subjectively centered and limited by the narrator’s horizon. In lyric poetry, characterized by the projection of the local onto the plane of the universal, metaphorization becomes a means of expressing the emotional experience of space “here-and-now” and intellectually comprehending it in the spiritual parameters of “everywhere-and-always”.
The depicted space can be emotionally and worldview colored by an unusual narrator or character perspective, strangely transformed, as in Ivan Kotlyarevsky’s poem “Aeneid” or Lina Kostenko’s dramatic poem “Duma about the Non-Azov Brothers”.
Stylistic parameters also determine the reception of the literary space: for realism, the detail of the landscape is inherent, for modernism – discontinuity, for postmodernism – metonymic clutter of the environment, through which an ironic portrait of despiritualized reality appears.