Abstract
The paper explores functions of communicative strategies in the female English-language biographical discourse in the second half of the 20th century. The analyzed works are biographies written by British and American women writers: “Emily Bronte. Her Life and Work” by M. Spark (1953), “Sartre: Romantic Rationalist” by I. Murdoch (1953), “Saint-Exupéry. A Biography” by S. Schiff (1994) and “Blonde” by J.C. Oates (2000). The objectives of the study were to analyze the genre characteristics of the texts, to identify their linguistic and extralinguistic means of presenting the main character and to reveal the gender-marking of English-language biographical discourse. In the course of the analysis, we formulated the main verbalization techniques of the female view on the image of the Other in its historical, national, social and cultural perspective. The article focuses on the ways authorial communicative strategies affect the reader’s perception of the main character in the presented biographies. We have come to the conclusion that the gender-marked text is characterized by the accentuated female subjectivity and the domineering evaluative component in creating the image in the realistic discourse (M. Spark, S. Schiff) and gamification in the postmodernist one (I. Murdoch, J.C. Oates). The choice of the main character is determined by national features, so while the English biographical discourse is characterized by its appeal to the phenomenon of creative consciousness, American biographers focus on the mechanisms of mythologization and demythologization of a cult personality.
Published Version
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