AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL TEXT: THE SHIFTING OF THE LINGUISTIC FORM (CASE STUDY OF ITS TYPOLOGY AND STYLISTIC FEATURES)

Abstract

The article provides an analysis of modern theoretical and methodological studies focused on the study of autobiographical texts within their typological and stylistic characteristics. It has been specified that the theoretical understanding of autobiographical texts closely correlates with the concepts of anthropocentrism and the autobiographical discourse.
 The purpose of our paper is to outline the main vectors of theoretical studies of the autobiography and the biography as texts of the autobiographical discourse. It is believed that the processed data have a fruitful basis for further research of the literary biography. It is noted that the linguistic form of the autobiography has undergone changes due to the skillful description of a person’s life as an amazing story via which one can outline his/her image.
 The attention has been focused on various scientific approaches to the study of an autobiographical text in modern linguistics. Different classification criteria as well as linguistic and stylistic properties of the autobiography and the biography have been established, such as: retrospectivity, chronology, identity of the author, narrator and protagonist, memory, openness, ratio of the past and the present, a pronounced personal element, ratio of subjective and objective principles.
 The article claims that the text of the artistic biography differs from the text of the literary biography. The latter is characterized by a gradual and slow depiction of data from the real life of a specific figure, an arbitrary way of presenting the material, a combination of elements of two styles (artistic and official), awareness of the picture of the past life of the object of the literary biography. Among the stylistic peculiarities of such texts the article distinguished emotional and expressive vocabulary, complex sentences, the author’s digressions that reflect his personal positions and "destroy" the ambiguity, one-planning and simplification of the biographical text.