FICTIONAL WORLD OF JOSEPH CONRAD’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY “A PERSONAL RECORD” FROM A DEICTIC SHIFT THEORY PERSPECTIVE
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32782/folium/2023.2.1Keywords:
fictional world, deictic shift theory, deixis, autobiographical text, Joseph ConradAbstract
The article examines the importance of Deictic Shift Theory for stylistic interpretation of Joseph Conrad’s autobiography A Personal Record. This article aims to identify cognitive specificity of the deictic space in the autobiographical text and highlight the ways of its representation in the subject, temporal and spatial deixis in terms of deictic shift theory. Special attention is paid to the use of deictic shift theory not only for the interpretation of the lived experience of the biographical subject by the reader but also for the explanation of the process of transition from real to fictional world, i.e. when the reader maintains a cognitive position within the fictional world, feels absorbed in the fictional events and interprets the text from this perspective. The present paper claims that Deictic Shift Theory proves to be relevant for the author’s position in the autobiographical text when a deictic marker of the subject deixis points out at various shifts of the deictic centre of the author in the fictional world, as well as participates in the process of understanding and acquisition of the fictional reality by the reader. The concepts of deictic theory include deictic fields, deixis typology namely subject, temporal, and spatial, deictic centres of the author, place and time, and also deictic shifts. Each of these categories is concerned with the deictic parameters of the autobiographical text. Modelling of the deictic space of the fictional world is implemented in the traditional types of deictic parameters of the text, i.e. the subject (subject deixis), the place (spatial deixis), and the time (temporal deixis) which, on the one hand, provide the process of understanding the fictional world of autobiography by the reader, and on the other hand, highlight the ambivalence of Joseph Conrad’s autobiography, a shift away from the traditional form presentation of chronological events. As a result, stylistic analysis of the fictional world of Joseph Conrad’s autobiography demonstrated that it is endowed by unusual narrative inconsistency of the presented events, frequent switching of temporal registers and the embedded spaces created by the writer testify to the specificity of deictic organization of the fictional world of autobiography.
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