Tropological space : the imaginary space of figuration

The paper is devoted to the concept of tropological space, introduced by Michel Foucault in 1966 and alluded to in Hayden White’s tropics of discourse (1973, 1978, 2000), but never described in any detail in literary semantics or linguistic stylistics. The author presents her theory of a triple functional subdivision of stylistic figures and, consequently, of tropes (micro-, macro- and mega (meta)-level of description) and relates it to a gradually expanding tropological space of particular figures, their chains and groupings within a text. The author postulates that tropological space, the imaginary space created through figuration, is a sub-space of the Wittgensteinian logical space as well as a sub-space of textual / discursive space. Although the discussion refers mostly to literary texts, tropology – a branch of stylistics / poetics / rhetoric makes generalizations valid for the study of all kinds of texts / discourses. Figuration is assumed here to be an inherent feature of conceptual and linguistic expression. Finally, the author raises a methodological query as to the ontological status of tropological space, opting for the approach which treats it as a peculiar kind of semantic space rather than a mere metaphoric term. The discussion is based mostly on the Anglo-American studies on figuration (K. Burke, H. White, P. de Man, J. Hillis Miller, G. Hartman) that are rooted in the neo-classical rhetoric and writings of G. Vico. This line of thinking draws its philosophical inspiration from the European hermeneutics of P. Ricoeur, the Foucaultian theory of discourses and the Derridean deconstructionist ideas on the operation of language. The author brings additionally into consideration the conception of artistic space propagated by the Russian semiotic tradition and V. N. Toporov (1983/2003) in particular

Emptiness in language - horror vacui?

The authoress argues that the conception of emptiness, ambivalent on physical and philosophical grounds, can be projected onto natural language. On the one hand, we can face here 'absolute emptiness', which is a total lack of certain elements in the linguistic system, on the other - gaps that tend to be filled in by the language user. It seems that the natural human propensity to complete the encountered empty places, lacunae, areas of indeterminacy, or blind spots is also well-visible in language and although such gaps can be spotted at each linguistic level, their occurrence is especially interesting at the level of semantics, stylistics and discourse analysis. The question of how interlocutors, readers and translators cope with such areas of blindness has been discussed by philosophers, literary critics, linguists and semioticians (most notably R. Ingarden, W. Iser, U. Eco, L. Dolezel). Dolezel rightly pointed out that 'absences' and 'silences' in texts (mostly fictional) can be either total (i. e. the ontological indeterminacy of fictional worlds) or only apparent (implicit meanings hidden yet recoverable from the text). The authoress of the present article perceives in the ontological incompleteness of fiction an instance of absolute, irrecoverable emptiness, whereas the idea of the text as an inferential machine, which through hints and suggestions prompts the reader to fill in the gaps (the case of concretisation in Ingarden's terminology) squares with her idea of the emptiness that tends toward an ultimate, if only partial completion. One of tenets of this paper is also the gamesome, ludic character of the activity of gap-filling. The completion of empty spaces in texts / discourses is a prototypical pragmatic game of the reader, critic or translator - their quite automatic answer to the authorial move of saturating the text with gaps (the term saturation or density of gaps has been borrowed from Dolezel 1995)

Synecdoche : an underestimated macrofigure?

This article analyses the constructive potential of synecdoche as a text-building mechanism. All too often not properly distinguished from its close and better-known relative, metonymy, synecdoche deserves to be treated as a separate figure, with its own individual function, i.e. the trope of essentiality, as envisioned by G. Vico, K. Burke and H. White. Synecdoche as a microfigure is usually confined to phrases or sentences, but its genuinely discursive function becomes visible when it acts as a macrofigure, forming synecdochical chains that structure larger stretches of texts. The chain of body parts synecdoches will be examined, drawn from M. Proust's prose, a set of poems by S. Plath and a set of poetic works by Cz. Miłosz. Macrosynecdoche passes smoothly into a megafigure, a tacit rhetorical strategy that underlies the entire text and influences its ultimate interpretation