A Study of Cognitive Levels in the Nitra School

Abstract

One of the major topics in the scope of interaction between the reader and the text is the level of perception as well as the cognitive, social and cultural presuppositions of the author, the text and the audience. Based on semantic theory, and relying on the level of focal and language prescripts in utterances, structuralists obtained valuable insights in the recognition of perception in the conceptual realm of the text. The Nitra school and, specifically one of its prominent theorists, Anton Popovic, for the first time discussed the semiotics of literary communication, text discourse structure, mental activity and meaning processing by the reader. The ideas of the Nitra school critics and theorists remained ignored in the turmoil of World War I until in the linguistic circles of Moscow, Prague and later in France, Germany and the United States it emerged in linguistic criticism and reader-response criticism. In the first section, this paper introduces the Nitra school and its most important concepts in the scope of the text and the reader communication. The second section considers the work of some recent theorists who, borrowing from this school, have focused on cognitive levels including communication, text discourse structure, mental activity processing, and saving and recovering data. This study shows that the Nitra school is one of the most important schools in the field of stylistics and text analysis that with two communication quality analysis approaches in a single text, and focusing on literature as a comprehensive communication system, has had a prominent but largely ignored role among other schools. Extended Abstract 1. Introduction By relying on linguistic assumptions and semantic theories, structuralists have identified important points concerning perceptions in the conceptual domains of texts. The semiotics of literary communication, the discursive structure of the text and mental activities and the development of meaning by the reader have been discussed in the Nitra School, especially by Anton Popovic, as one of its most important theorists. The ideas of the Nitra School theorists are mostly studied in stylistics, which mainly deals with the cognitive analysis of communication in a single text, and in literature, as a comprehensive system of communication in semantics. 2. Theoretical Framework Discussions opened up by the Nitra School mostly revolve around the issues categorized by formalists in 1914. The cognitive levels of communication are of great importance to them in understanding literary texts. Popovic put forward the concepts of meta-communication and inter-textual continuity and contributed to the interpretative-analytical identity of texts in the Nitra School. In the present article the cognitive levels in this school are studied. 3. Methodology Adopting the descriptive-analytic method, the present paper studies the history of the Nitra School. The fundamental concepts of this school are compared with those of other structuralist schools. 4. Findings This approach is clearly different from the Russian formalist approach to intertexuality. In the formalist approach the self-sufficiency of the text is of great importance, while in the Nitra School the text is the product of an interaction between the ‘source text’ and the ‘target text’. Therefore, any text carries the discursive and ideological load of the source. Popovic finds this process to be more prominent in translation. 5. Conclusion Understanding the main concepts of the Nitra School is of great importance in understanding formalist approaches to reading texts. The ideas of the main theorists of this school were later incorporated into the reader-response criticism and textual criticism. These ideas are in many ways similar; yet, they have differences. The Nitra School theorists developed concepts such as meta-communication, the primary text and the secondary text, thus entering into poststructuralist discussions. They introduced the concepts of literary education and theory of meta-communications and paved the way for a different typology of literary and artistic texts, which eventually led to the sociology of literary life.