Аллюзивное имя собственное как средство выражения содержательно-подтекстовой информации в англоязычном художественном тексте (на материале текста романа «Волхв» Джона Фаулза / J. Fowles “The Magus”)

Abstract

The study aims to identify the ways of presenting content-related and subtext information when using allusive proper names in literary texts. The research is based on the text of John Fowles’s novel “The Magus”. The paper considers modern approaches to the notion of subtext, one of the types of information in the text along with substantive-factual and substantive-conceptual information. The allusive proper name is considered as one of the means of subtext expression. The paper analyzes the features of content-related and subtext information, demonstrates a correlation between the notions of presupposition, implication, subtext and allusion and examines philologists’ points of view regarding the terms related to allusion. The scientific originality of the study lies in the fact that it considers the allusive proper name as one of the means of subtext expression, namely such types of content-related and subtext information as rational-logical, artistic-aesthetic and cultural-historical information, which are manifested at the explicit and implicit levels of a literary text, while subtext can contain both explicitly and implicitly expressed elements making it easier for the reader to decode information. The allusive proper name acts as a means of subtext and implicitness expression. The results of the study include the following. Subtext is characterized by psychological and explicit-implicit nature of expression. The following options are possible for presenting information through language signs and an associative background. A part of the information of subtext is represented explicitly by linguistic units in the context, the rest of the information is not represented in the formal plane of the text, but can be restored based on the analysis of explicitly represented linguistic units. Six types of correlation between explicit/implicit information contained in a literary text, namely artistic-aesthetic, rational-logical and cultural-historical information, have been identified.