Artistic details within the semantic rhythm of a dramatic play

Abstract

The concept of semantic rhythm as the vehicle of making abstraction of an artistic text enables the detection of intentionality and artistic aims inherent for the text. It is the conflict of automatism and intentionality that becomes its basis and enables the widening of rhythmic properties over the macroscopic dimension of a whole work. The rhythmic effects are displayed through the centralization of the semantic space of a text with accentuation (the field structure), through the formation of closed cycles as the textual units and with the rise of distant connections between the remote textual segments. Rhythm is conceived as a non-linear multidimensional phenomenon where the components manifested in text permanently coexist and interact with the latent ones. Semantic rhythm is a particular abstraction, together with the textual semantic net, that is peculiar for its personal location (especially authorization) and positional localization. The relation “part — whole” becomes more important than that of “genus — species” (predicate — subject) determining thus the constructive role of details. This enables describing the semantic rhythm with the names that are reconceived as the partitive designations of some entirety, the rhetoric figure of hendiadys being here taken as an example. The rows of details become the forces of making up textual cycles where the feedback (recursion) between textual components arises as the revelation of its purposefulness. The seclusion of such cycles contributes to the formation of particular textual space and time. It is the subtext that is to be traced behind the interconnection of such cyclic textual elements that they refer to involving thus latent information in the interpretation of a text. The interpretative mission of the rhythmic cycles of details determines their importance for theatre as the instrument of the disclosure of dramatis personae’s intentions that the text of a dramatic play contains. It is in the concept of semantic rhythm as an intentional object that the approaches and experiences of musicology, theatrical study and philology display their mutuality as separate branches of researches of a complex problem.