THE “FAUSTUS” SYMBOL: TOWARDS THE ISSUE OF THE RELATION OF TEXT TO CULTURAL CONTEXT (BASED ON THE ENGLISH LITERARY TEXTS OF THE LATE 16TH - THE EARLY 21ST CENTURIES

Abstract

The article focuses on one of the main issues of text linguistics ‒ the relation of the text to cultural context. The research is based on English literary texts of the late 16th ‒ the early 21st centuries, mainly with reference to the source text of English “Faustus” literature – the drama of Christopher Marlowe “The Tragic History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus”. The main aim of this article lies in discovering all the possible interpretations of the Faustus’ symbol in English literary texts of the late 16th - the early 21st centuries. Some major theoretical aspects of a literary text and the cultural context are studied from the linguist’s perspective. The basic features of the cultural context and a range of tasks that a linguist performs while interpreting the text are described. The correlation betweenhe the two notions is established. Such textual characteristics as reconstruction of outlook, memory of culture and historical reality are elucidated as well. The tasks which the linguist performs while interpreting the text are as follows: to reconstruct the lingual and cultural space of the author (taking into account the cultural context of writing), to analyze the text from the point of view of the author’s intention, and to analyze the possible perception of the text by the reader in view of his/her knowledge of the context and the system of evaluations. The dual sign nature of the literary text is treated as that of great importance. It is proved that the text appears as a reality, which has its own nature, independent of the author, constantly bringigng to light the fact that it is a creation of something with a meaning. The different stages of the dual sign nature of a literary text are taken into consideration, and the issue of the interrelation between the cultural context and the text of a drama piece has been discussed. Keywords: “Faustus” symbol, literary text, cultural context, interpretation, cultural code, intention of the author, English Faustus literature.