Emotion concepts for representing the vicissitudes of fate in Markus Zusak’s “Bridge of Clay”

Abstract

The problem of studying emotionally expressive information contained in a text is of considerable interest since it interprets reality, expressing value or emotionally significant attitudes toward this reality. The analysis of the emotivity and expressiveness of a literary text focuses primarily on its research from the cognitive (separation of emotiogenic knowledge) and semantic (determining the features of its use to indicate the author’s purposes) perspectives. A literary text is considered as a dual dimension: on the one hand, it is related to emotions, and on the other hand, it is specified by them. The aim of the article is to identify and examine the emotional concepts represented in Markus Zusak’s Bridge of Clay for portraying the vicissitudes of fate. The breath-taking story revolves around the Dunbar family of ‘ramshackle tragedy’ and brims with pathos. To analyse the emotion concepts, the following methods have been employed: the methods of interpretation and systematisation; contextual, stylistic, and distributive analysis as also a method of emotional valence, and the hypothetico-deductive method. The Results of the Study show that emotion concepts in Zusak’s Bridge of Clay are realised at the following levels: phonetics, morphology, and semantics, which shows the universality of functioning emotion concepts in fictional discourse. The emotion concept appears as a single entity that consists of attributes of emotivity, which are anthropocentric and character-creating. The lexical units, chosen by Zusak, convey the author’s intentions, explicitly or implicitly indicating the emotional nature of the text. Since characters belong to the category of essential universals of a literary text, the emotional meanings included in its structure have a special informative significance. The character’s emotions are represented as the special psychological reality, and the set of emotions in the text appears as a kind of dynamic plurality that changes as the story develops.