The Phenomenon of the Book as an Intercommunication Subject: Renaissance Practices in Modern Reflections

Abstract

The paper presents the study of book-reader relations within the known triad book-oeuvre-reader. It was reader’s perception of a book, not oeuvre as a piece of literature work that became the object of the study. The study is based on Yu. Lotman’s conceptual observations on text functions and status; and modern Ukrainian researcher V. Markova’ ones on book communication. The ground for conclusions was obtained via analysis of mentions on a book as a person (descriptions, addresses) and communication with the book which could be found in literature texts of various genres (poems, letters, hagiography, humanists’ treatises etc.) composed by Ancient Roman, Italian Middle Ages and Renaissance authors.The focus of the paper is an attempt to complement present scheme of book communication with levels reader-book and reader-author. The emergence and maintaining of the association of an author with his work and the book that contains this work, in the reader’s consciousness, is justified. It has been shown that communication which takes place at these levels could be regarded as an intercommunication, so book and book/author in turn, as intercommunication subjects.Analysis of Renaissance authors’ oeuvres has allowed proving that besides being mean for information transfer, the book became a source of emotions and motives, and readers used to talk to the book about it through reader’s questions addressing the book, and it means the questions are for its author. It makes it possible to state that the book takes part in a conditioned and motivational intercommunication. It is found out that an extrapolation of the author’s personality to the book influenced the reader’s attitude to the book.First signs that the book became not just a means of communication but its participant could be obtained in the culture of Ancient Rome, namely in Cicero’s letters and poems of some other authors. The culture of the European Middle Ages provides us with some samples which could allow us to recognize the book only as a conductor of communication. Renaissance authors in turn often used the motif of intercommunication with books in fruitful and different ways. Later the need in information in a broad sense had caused so-called pragmatic reading. As a result position of reader’s demand to the book became more consumerist, more rational, reasonable. Reader’s intercommunication with a book had lost its actuality for a long time. Nowadays, because of the dissemination of electronic books, a reader’s intercommunication with a book seems unlikely.