All it means in this day and age is that а whole generation of people only get to know the great works of literature – Austen, Eliot, Dickens, Shakespeare and so on – through the television." "I have to say, I think it’s disgraceful. The reference is more than a loan of the plot, it is the same story, with some of the same characters and escalation of events. The Helen Fielding’s «Bridget Jones’s Diary» hasаstrong reference to Jane Austen’s «Pride and Prejudice». As a consequence, within the framework of this approach, the concept the allusion turns out to be broad and is sometimes even seen as an unconscious or conscious literary imitation. Fateeva addresses the technique of allusion from the point of view of intertextuality and offers the following definition: allusion is the borrowing of certain pretext elements, by which they are recognized in the recipient text, where the predication is occured. Traditional interpretations of the phenomenon of intertextuality presuppose a search for the implications inherent in the text of the work of one or another author, the presence of borrowings in it. The essence of the phenomenon of intertextuality lies in the fact that the meaning of a work of art is fully or partially formed by reference to another text, which is precedent in relation to the text being created. Allusion is one of the most effective and frequently used means of increasing the semantic and emotionally aesthetic content of a work of verbal art. Intertextuality as an intrinsic property of a literary text is realized to the fullest extent through the stylistic device of allusion. Also, an allusion is a means of conveying author's intentions, which must be correctly interpreted for a successful communication.Īn allusion, in this case, is to the English folklore piece "Jack and the Beanstalk". Presented in just one word, it can refer to entire texts or real life events. Thus, the allusion is a sign of a language that encodes a large amount of information. Perry divides allusions to textual elements and processes of activation of texts, noting two characteristics of an allusive unit: statistical and dynamic. The researcher notes that an allusion is a sign in a new text that indicates a referent. Perry, who studies the semantic and pragmatic approaches, considers allusion as a type of reference to a speech act. Using the traditional division of semiotics into semantics, syntactics and pragmatics, researchers of this sphere usually emphasize the special nature of allusion as an object of pragmatics.
#Allusions in i have a dream speech free
The linguosemiotic approach to the definition of the essence of allusion is characterized by the understanding of this phenomenon as the free use (substitution) of one word instead of another in oral or written speech (works by A.S. As an example, one can name the title of the play «Pygmalion», that is the allusion – the indirect reference to the image of the Greek mythology's sculptor. Shaw is one of the authors who make use of classic and modern myths to discuss some problems of the society. In this situation allusion is a marker of the individual style of the writer the emphasis is on the personality of the author and his/ her picture of the world.ī. In such studies an analysis of individual cases of the use of allusions, specific to the individual author's style, is carried out, which is often interesting in itself, but does not aim to reveal the mechanism of action of the allusion as a stylistic device. Timenchik and others), where allusion is analyzed as a marker indicating the peculiarities of the creative manner of a particular writer. Within the framework of the first of the above-mentioned approaches, one can distinguish a number of works (L.M.
Nowadays, there are following approaches to the study of allusion: literary, linguosemiotic, intertextual, cognitive, cognitive-discursive, linguostylistic and linguocultural. The purpose of this article is to consider the existing approaches to the study of allusion and identify its main properties. However, it is obvious that allusion is a multifaceted phenomenon, which implies the possibility of studying it in a variety of aspects, in accordance with the goals of a particular study, which can have both literary and linguistic or culturological orientation.
The allusion is often perceived as a kind of "decoration" of the text or oral speech. In a broad sense, it is defined simply as an indirect reference to one or another previously written text or fact. The problem of interpreting the concept of "allusion" has always been acute in linguistics.