Interaction between Special and General Meaning of French Legal Terms and Cultural Concepts as a Means of Social Characterization in Marcel Proust’s Novel “À la recherche du temps perdu”

Abstract

The article deals with the analysis of the interaction between legal terms and cultural concepts in Marcel Proust’s novel “In Search of Lost Time” (“À la recherche du temps perdu”). Our primary concern is to contribute to the studies of the relations between the language of professional communication and general communication language within a literary text, and, therefore, to examine the functioning of legal and general vocabulary in the novel. Much has been done in the field of special terms and neutral lexis classification in professional language, but undoubtedly, just as much remains to be done. The analysis of different types of stylistic devices has been widely presented in specialized literature. It would be reasonable to study French legal terms from the point of view of their polysemy as well as from a larger perspective of the interaction between legal culture and culture in general. What we are aiming at is to establish some correspondences of legal concepts to those of everyday life, and above all, their relations with other allusions in the general culture domain. To attain our aim we should look at the legal concepts we detected within a larger context of their functioning. Our analysis reveals that the writer uses legal terms and legal concepts in order to describe some characters of the novel and to represent certain aspects of the social reality he depicts. Love relationship between Marcel and Albertine is illustrated with some examples from the domains of civil, criminal and financial law, which is not usually associated with such a theme. Multiple allusions to various cultural phenomena of legal culture and of culture in general, namely classical theatre and painting, the history of Ancient Greece and Rome express the author’s irony by contrast.