Psychological Ways of Understanding Textual Reality of the Novel

Abstract

The aim of the research is to examine the most important features of Charles Dickens’ individual style of writing and the characteristics of students’ understanding of Charles Dickens, the effect produced by the language expressive means and stylistic devices in the authors’ texts of students.

Methods of the research. The following theoretical methods of the research were used to solve the tasks formulated in the article: a categorical method, structural and functional methods, the methods of the analysis, systematization, modeling, generalization. The experimental method is the method of interview.

The results of the research. We note that every novel is a cultural phenomenon. The global question what makes a novel «cultural» is that it is not the speech information itself that describes the «passive and voiceless» object of a particular study, but the fact that the novel is the text of another, dissimilar to our consciousness. When we are dealing with the author, with his personal worldview and the meaning that appears in the text is relevant. There is nothing in the culture but meanings and means of their transmission. The novel is a phenomenon of a certain culture and, as a result, can be considered as a «meaningful world». During the «meeting» of the person with the work, our own understanding of life will be included into the situation of cultural communication with the author. The personal meanings of the recipient and the author’s one are always dissimilar, even completely dissimilar, sometimes strikingly different from each other. This, of course, in some a way complicates the process of understanding a novel, but this discrepancy influences on its understanding. Scholars consider a novel to be a piece of another consciousness, the understanding of which inevitably turns into a dialogue, a «meeting in a meaningful world».

We recognize the main characteristic of a novel as its dialogic nature, emphasizing two-dimensional existence of the text. We think that each text has its subject, the author. Also there is another plan of the text – another subject, which reproduces someone another text and creates so called outlined text (commented, evaluated, denied). We’d like to emphasize the complexity of the relationships between these two plans, because they create a «meeting» of two texts – the completed structure and some text that can be created; it is a meeting of two consciousnesses, two authors. That is why, the dialogical nature of a no vel directs the author’s position, the author’s «voice» to the reader, who agrees or disagrees, asks, answers or not, also denies.

Conclusions. Therefore, we can be argue that a novel is understood as the implementation of a system, as a lexical and syntactical formation, which contains signs of natural language, which has been defined by the author with the help of boundaries and internal semiotic organization. The latter at the syntagmatic level turns the text into a structural whole. The basis of a novel is its output in other texts, pieces of art, the presence of such characteristics as communicative orientation.

We also believe that any novel is dialogical in its internal structure, because it contains both real and hidden appeals to some authors, directed against the views of other authors. If a non-dialogical text is possible it would be meaningless or would take on a form that can be given any meaning that is practically the same.