SEMIOTICS OF IMAGE-SYMBOL OF WATER IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN MULTICULTURAL PROSE (in “Black Water” by Joyce Carol Oates and "Beloved" by Toni Morrison)

Abstract

Introduction. The article explores the image-symbol of water, the semiotic means of its realization in the novels by American writers of different ethnoidentity Toni Morrison “Beloved” and Joyce Carol Oates “Black water”. An image-symbol is understood as such a sign, which is a component of the semiotic fabric of literary prose text, endowed with significantethno-cultural information and is considered to be an ethno-cultural image-symbol. The specifics of contemporary American multicultural prosaic texts is in their relating to the mythology, ethnocultural customs and traditions, beliefs of ethnicity living on the territory of the contemporary United States. Various cultural codes are accumulated in the text canvas of literary works, which serve as markers of belonging to a particular culture. The symbol of water depicts the archetypal knowledge of American and African-American ethnicity about worldview and cultural memory. It encodes the various ethno-cultural and axiological values and their hierarchy inherent in the studied ethnicities. The image symbol of water from texts of contemporary American writers of different ethnic identity is a sign of the ethno-cultural worldview and world perception of African-American and American people and embodies different ethno-cultural codes.Purpose. The article aims at linguosemiotic constructing the image-symbol of water in contemporary American multicultural prose.Methods. The paper is based on such scope of methods, as textual and contextual analysis, the linguosemiotic method, the method of contrastive and descriptive analysis, the linguocultural method and the method of linguistic interpretation the semiotic sense of the image-symbol.Results. In the novel “Beloved” by T. Morrison, the symbolic significance of water is revealed to characterize the novel's main character, Beloved, who symbolizes the individual and collective past of the African American people. The symbolic meaning of water in Joyce Carol Oates's novel “Black water” is radically rethought and, unlike the analyzed novel by T. Morrison,is the epitome of dark matter that robs a young girl of her life. Linguosemiotic features of the analyzed symbol are identified in the paper.Conclusion. The descriptive-contrastive analysis of the image-symbol of water in the texts of American writers of different ethnical identity has allowed us to characterize the different semiotic properties of this symbol in Toni Morrison, in which it symbolizes a return to life, resurrection and rebirth, and in Joyce Carol Oates's novel, in which it is highlighted thesymbolic meaning of death. It is found that in the analyzed texts, the image-symbol of water serves as a marker of change in the status of the character, and its symbolic characteristics reproduce the transition from one state to another, from one reality to another. The perspectiveof our further investigation will be working out the methods and ways of decoding the hidden meanings in literary multicultural texts with ethnocultural sense, the study of multilevel textual means of creating the literary images of resilient women as components of the literary space.Therefore, each linguistic sign is regarded as a component of the semiotic fabric of the prosaic text, endowed with meaningful ethno-cultural information and considered as ethno-cultural image-symbol.